With Bob Taylor

SENTIMENT AND STORY

Oh, what a wonderful magician and what a tyrant king is Love, the King of Kings!

Look at the care-worn faces in the offices and counting rooms and on the business marts of the world. Look out yonder at the millions in the factories and fields, with beaded brows, and knotted muscles, and calloused hands, coining thought into gold, and sweat into silver. There is a mighty power moving on those restless tides; they are sowing and reaping for the helpless and the innocent; Love hath written his name in every heart, and in every life there is a love story. Now look yonder in the purple glow of eventide, how the millions dissolve and vanish among the shadows. The law of the King has been obeyed, and labor finds its sweet reward in the palace of love, by the brawling brook of laughter, on the brink of the river of song.

But, Lord, how soon the palace crumbles! And how surely the vibrant streams run dry when labor leaves his task undone, or toil takes his gold to other shrines!

If you would keep the loom of love in motion, you must be a flying shuttle of industry by day and spend your evenings at home. The shuttle delivers the thread; you must deliver the bread and grease the bobbins with butter.

The shuttle is always in its place. Art thou, O King? When the light is smiling through the window out into the darkness, and thy home is ringing with the laughter and song of children within, art thou there to laugh and sing with them? And when the baby cries in the dead hours of the night, dost thou meekly wear thy yoke of love and walk the floor and sweetly sing to thy screaming progeny?

Alas! too often thou art found where sherry glows and champagne flows and the night is very, very merry, O King!

I saw a truant old gentleman vanish from his labors to a carousal one evening, and that night he went home as drunk as a lord, with unsteady steps and slow, dreading the storm within, and softly singing to himself as he went:

The queen of the household, who had been nursing her rage, met him at the door with a face like a drawn tomahawk; and the clock struck one, and she struck, too, as he entered.

“How dare you come home to me at this hour of the night?” she shouted in her anger.

“Why, my dear, it was jis’ ten o’clock when I left prayer meetin’, an’ I come right straight home.”

“Yes, prayer meeting! You look like prayer meeting! Look at the hands on the dial of that clock; it has just struck one.”

“Well, now, madam,” he said, “if you propose to believe a durned little dollar-and-a-half clock before you’ll believe your husband, that’s all right; but I shall certainly think that I have not found the amiable spirit in this palace of love which I expected to find on my arrival.”

And the threads of love popped, and the loom stopped for several hours.

An uncrowned old King went to his little palace one night under the influence of King Alcohol, as usual. His unhappy wife let him in at the door and burst into tears and said:

“Husband, why do you come home every night in this drunken condition?”

“Why,” he said, “my dear, you are so pretty that I jist naturally love to look at you double!”

Did you ever see a tramp tramping by and pausing at your door to beg a benediction—not of love, but of bread? What cared this wandering boy for love? His heart was in the grave; he was the “somnambulist of a shattered dream;” he was a romance in rags, a seedy poem, a tattered song, crumpled by the hand of fate and thrown into the waste-basket of oblivion.

He halted at a farmhouse one rainy day and proposed to kill all the rats on the place for his dinner. “Very well,” said the farmer, “it’s a bargain.” He called his neighbors in to see the killing. The tramp ate for an hour, and when he had finished he called for a spade. Seating himself in the middle of the room, he raised the spade over his shoulder and shouted: “Now fetch on your rats!”

He stopped at an old fellow’s door and told him he was a dentist, and smilingly proposed to put a good set of teeth in a fresh apple pie for nothing.

I saw love enter the gubernatorial door to plead for love one day, and the old mother sat and wept in the presence of the Governor, while the aged father told the story of a love that was wrecked long ago, a life that was ruined, and a lover that wandered away with the death wound in his heart. Then I heard him tell the story of a tramp whose journey had ended at last within the prison walls; and I went out with them and stood at the gate of hell. I looked in and saw the ghastly stripes of shame and the pallid faces of crime moving to and fro, laboring under the lash of justice and shrinking from the scorn of their fellow man. I entered and looked again; there was not a smile nor a single peal of laughter, but melancholy’s ghost of song still lingered behind the iron bars to comfort languishing love.

I saw children of tender age in that vortex of living death, and I said, “Hell was not made for children;” and I dragged them out and delivered them to their mothers. I saw youths who had committed crime in the heat of passion, dying in disgrace, and I dragged them out and sent them home, some with a new hope and some to die. I saw repentant men who had suffered long enough, and I dragged them out and gave them to their wives and their children. I saw the erstwhile tramp, the romance in rags, the tattered song, now the striped doxology of a misspent life; two trembling hands pointed to him. I turned to the old folks and said: “His crime was not great, and you are old and feeble;” and I dragged him out and left them weeping upon his bosom.

An overbearing lawyer once shouted to an old lady whom he was examining on the witness stand:

“Madam, please confine yourself to the facts!”

The old lady turned around to him and said:

“Well, sir, you are no gentleman; that’s a fact.”

An old doctor examined his patient one afternoon and coldly said to him:

“You are dying, sir; have you any wish to express before you pass over the river?”

“Yes,” said the patient, feebly, “I wish I had employed another doctor.”

The world loves us if we succeed; it despises us if we fail; it piles ice around its benefactors, and gives the meed of praise to genius only when genius is in the grave. But what do words of praise avail to lift the shadows from a path no longer pressed by weary feet? Why fill the hands of the dead with flowers which you have withheld from the living? Who would not rather have one smile, one tender word to-day, than to know that a million roses would be heaped upon his coffin? Who would not rather live and dream among the flowers of love than to sleep the dreamless sleep beneath a wilderness of flowers?

Then why not let the Gulf Stream of love flow on? For its warm current breathes upon the icy shores of mortal life and makes them blossom with laughter and song. Love is the soul of the beautiful, the true and the good; it is all there is of happiness.

But “the course of true love never did run smooth.” Listen to my tale of woe. An absent-minded old bachelor once fell in love with a beautiful girl and instantly prepared for battle with the flounced and powdered enemy. At first his plans worked well, and he was about to win a great victory over all the swells in town; but an accident happened which changed his destiny and wrecked his hopes of conquest and happiness. The church bell rang one bright Sabbath morning, and he knew that his idol would be there; and he diked himself in faultless style and curled his sorrel moustache till it looked like the tail of a pug. The excitement of the occasion made him more absent-minded than ever, and he waited until the worshipers had assembled, and then walked down the aisle in triumph, the observed of all observers, with his overcoat hanging on his arm; but the maiden looked at his overcoat and blushed; the preacher looked at it and smiled, and the congregation looked at it and broke into laughter; and the old bachelor looked down, and it was his every-day pantaloons. His hope exploded like a bubble in the air, and he dropped the garment and flew.

We have stepped over the threshold of the twentieth century. What greater wonders will it unfold to us? It may be that another magician, greater even than Edison, the “Wizard of Menlo Park,” will rise up and coax the very laws of nature into easy compliance with his unheard-of dreams. I think he will construct an electric railway in the form of a huge tube, and call it the “electro-scoot,” and passengers will enter it in New York and touch a button and arrive in San Francisco two hours before they started!

I think a new discovery will be made by which the young man of the future may stand at his “kiss-o-phone” in New York and kiss his sweetheart in Chicago with all the delightful sensations of the “aforesaid and the same.”

I think some Liebig will reduce foods to their last analyses, and, by an ultimate concentration of their elements, will enable the man of the future to carry a year’s provisions in his vest pocket. The dude will store his rations in the head of his cane, and the commissary department of a whole army will consist of a mule and a pair of saddlebags. A trainload of cabbage will be transported in a sardine box and a thousand fat Texas cattle in an oyster can.

Power will be condensed from a forty-horse engine to a quart cup. Wagons will roll by the power in their axles, and the cushions of our buggies will cover the force that propels them. The armies of the future will fight with chain lightning, and the battlefields will be in the air.

Some dreaming Icarus will perfect the flying machine, and upon the aluminum wings of the swift Pegasus of the air social, civic and military parades will be held.

The rainbow will be converted into a Ferris wheel; all men will be bald-headed; the women will run the government—and then I think the end of time will be near at hand!

A great many youths think that if a man has brain-power he can accomplish anything. So he can, but a study of the men who are failures, the men who fill our penitentiaries and our sanitariums, will show that unless ability is ballasted with character, its possessor is unstable and untrustworthy. There is a tremendous power in ability, boys, when added to character.