You may fancy it is easy,
When the world is fighting drunk,
To compile a colyum wheezy
With a lot of airy junk--
To maintain a mental quiet
And a philosophic ca'm,
And to give, amid the riot,
Not a dam.
You may think it is no trick to
Can the topic militaire,
And determinedly stick to
Jape and jingle light as air--
To be pertly paragraphic
And to jollity inclined,
In an evenly seraphic
State of mind.
When our anger justified is,
And the nation's on the brink;
When Herr Dernburg--durn his hide!--is
To be chased across the drink;
When the cabinet is meeting,
And the ultimatums fly,
And the tom-toms are a-beating
A defy;
When it's raining gall and bitters--
You may think it is a pipe
To erect a Tower of Titters
With a lot of lines o' type,
To be whimsical and wheezy,
Full of {quip and quirk and quiz.
{quibbles queer and quaint.
Do you fancy _that_ is easy?
Well--it {is.
{ain't.
* * *
The dissolution of Farmer Pierson, of Princeton, Ill., from
rough-on-rats administered, it is charged, by his wife and her gentleman
friend, is a murder case that reminds us of New England, where that
variety of triangle reaches stages of grewsomeness surpassed only by
"The Love of Three Kings." How often, in our delirious reporter days,
did we journey to some remote village in Vermont or New Hampshire, to
inquire into the passing of an honest agriculturist whose wife, assisted
by the hired man, had spiced his biscuits with arsenic or strychnine.
* * *
On the menu of the Woman's City Club: "Scrambled Brains." Do you wonder,
my dear?
* * *
We quite understand that if Mr. Moiseiwitsch is to establish himself
with the public he must play old stuff, even such dreadful things as the
Mozart-Liszt "Don Giovanni." It is with Chopin valses and Liszt
rhapsodies that a pianist plays an audience into a hall, but he should
put on some stuff to play the audience out with. Under this arrangement
those of us who have heard Chopin's Fantasie as often as we can endure
may come late, while those who do not "understand" Debussy, Albeniz, and
other moderns may leave early. The old stuff is just as good to-day as
it was twenty years ago, but some of us ancients have got past that
stage of musical development.
* * *