We are astonished to see that a Boston dealer in canned goods has
failed. If there is one branch of business that ought to be solid it
is that of canning fruits and things, for there must be the almightiest
profit on it that there is on anything. It must be remembered that the
stuff is canned when it is not salable in its natural state.
If the canners took tomatoes, for instance, when they first came around,
at half a dollar for six, and canned them, there would be some excuse
for charging twenty-five cents for a tin thing full, but they wait until
the vines are so full of tomatoes that the producer will pay the cartage
if you will haul them away, and then the tomatoes are dipped into hot
water so the skin will drop off, and they are chucked into cans that
cost two cents each, and you pay two shillings for them, when you
get hungry for tomatoes. The same way with peas, and peaches, and
everything.
Did you ever try to eat canned peas? They are always old back numbers
that are as hard and tasteless as chips, and are canned after they have
been dried for seed. We bought a can of peas once for two shillings and
couldn't crack them with a nut cracker. But they were not a dead loss,
as we used them the next fall for buck shot. Actually, we shot a coon
with a charge of those peas, and he came down and struck the water, and
died of the cholera morbus the next day.
Talk of canned peaches; in the course of a brilliant career of forty
years we have never seen only six cans of peaches that were worth the
powder to blast them open. A man that will invent a can opener that will
split open one of these pale, sickly, hard hearted canned peaches, that
swim around in a pint of slippery elm juice in a tin can, has got a
fortune. And they have got to canning pumpkin, and charging money for
it.
Why, for a dollar a canning firm can buy pumpkins enough to fill all
the tin cans that they can make in a year, and yet they charge a fellow
twenty cents for a can of pumpkin, and then the canning establishment
fails. It must be that some raw pumpkin has soured on the hands of the
Boston firm, or may be, and now we think we are on the right track to
ferret out the failure, it may be that the canning of Boston baked beans
is what caused the stoppage.
We had read of Boston baked beans since school days, and had never seen
any till four years ago, when we went to a picnic and bought a can
to take along. We new how baked beans ought to be cooked from years'
experience, but supposed the Boston bean must hold over every other
bean, so when the can was opened and we found that every bean was
separate from every other bean, and seemed to be out on its own
recognizance, and that they were as hard as a flint, we gave them to
the children to play marbles with, and soured on Boston baked beans.
Probably it was canning Boston beans that broke up the canning
establishment.
*****
The Decoration Day exercises at Appleton were somewhat marred by a
discussion as to whether the graves of Confederate soldiers should be
decorated, and one man--Prof. Sawyer--a soldier who lost a leg in the
army, said that if anybody should attempt to decorate a rebel soldier's
grave in his vicinity, it would have to be done over his--Sawyer's--dead
body.
Notwithstanding this heartrending recital, the graves of rebel soldiers
in many places in this state and throughout the north, were decorated by
Union soldiers. What hurt does it do to throw a few flowers on the clay
that covers one who was once your enemy? Nobody thinks less of the Union
soldier for it, and it would make the southern mother or sister of the
dead boy feel so much better to know that kind hands at the north had
done a noble act.
Suppose this Professor Sawyer had been killed and buried down south,
and the Confederate people should be decorating the graves of their
own dead, and they should throw a few flowers on his grave, and some
hot-headed vindictive rebel should get on his ear and say that the man
who laid that bouquet on the Yankee's grave would have to take it off
or fight. The professor, if he laid there and heard it, would feel like
getting out of the grave, and taking a crutch and mauling the liver out
of the bigoted rebel.
It is not the rebel's cause that we decorate, but we put a few flowers
above his remains to show the people who loved him at home, that there
is nothing so confounded mean about us after all, and that we do as we
would be done by, and that while we were mad, and sassy, and full of
fight, eighteen years ago, we want to be friends, and shake hands
over the respective graves of our loved ones, and quit making fools of
ourselves.
*****
A Ridiculous scene occurred a Palmyra, the other day. The furnace in the
basement of the church is reached by a trap door, which is right beside
the pulpit. There was a new preacher there from abroad, and he did not
know anything about the trap door, and the sexton went down there to
fix the fire, before the new minister arrived. The minister had just got
warmed up in his sermon, and was picturing to his hearers hell in all
its heat. He had got excited and told of the lake of burning brimstone
below, where the devil was the stoker, and where the heat was ten
thousand times hotter than a political campaign, and where the souls of
the wicked would roast, and fry, and stew until the place froze over.
Wiping the perspiration from his face, he said, pointing to the floor,
“Ah, my friends, look down into that seething, burning lake, and--” Just
at this point the trap door raised a little, and the sexton's face,
with coal smut all over it, appeared. He wanted to come up and hear the
sermon.
If hell had broke loose, the new minister could not have been more
astonished. He stepped back, grasped his manuscript, and was just about
to jump from the pulpit, when a deacon on the front seat said, “It's all
right, brother, he has only _been down below to see about the fire._”
The sexton came up and shut down the trap door, the color came back to
the face of the minister, and he went on, though the incident seemed to
take the tuck all out of him.
A traveling man who happened to be at the church tells us that he knows
the minister was scared, for he sweat so that the perspiration run right
down on the carpet and made a puddle as though a dipper of water had
been tipped over there. The minister says he was not scared, but we
don't see how he could help it.