Arp Kept at Work…His
Wife Reminds Him When Repairing Is Needed…Bill Always Obeys Her Orders…He Then
Tells of the Times When He Was Young and How Boys and Girls Used to Act
My wife said she had a promotion that we would have an early
fall and I had better prepare for it right away. She reminded me that there
were some broken glass on the roof of the flower pit and the sash needed
repainting and the shelves renewing and I might whitewash the brick wall and so
forth and so fifth and so on. Well, I have done all that and was humbly waiting
for the next order when she told me that Sam, the darkey, wasent coming to run
the lawn mower over the grass in the front yard and maybe I could do it and
save 75 cents. Well, I have done that, but nobody paid me the 75 cents and next
time I knew she sent one of the grandchildren to me for 75 cents to pay her
debt to the aid society. These women have got nearly as many clubs and
societies as the men, but they stay at home of nights and that is better than
the men do. There are the Masons and Odd Fellows and Nights of Pythias and
Nights of Damon and the Royal Arcanum and the Elks and the Nights of Jeriocho
and Nights of Labor and they are all nights or midnights,and the women have to
stay at home and nurse the children. If I was a marrying woman I would strike
out the word obey and put in a promise for the man that he wouldn’t join
anything that “took him away from home at night.” It’s bad enough for young
folks to tramp around at night hunting for the moon. They are crazy about the
moon, and that’s why crazy folks are called lunatics—for lunah means the moon
and the ticks are not far off on a moonlight walk in the woods. Last Tuesday
night there were six couples of our lunatics who went up the river road in
search of the moon. They wanted to see it rise from out of the water and they
had to get out to the big, flat rock in the river to see it, and they had to
slide down the bank to reach the rock, and the young men cooned it down first
to clear the way and the yaller jackets were waiting for them and by the time
the girls were on the slide the little devils began the attack and they took
‘em on the slide in the flank and in the rear, in the face and shirt waist and
arms and legs, and took the young men, too, and such screaming and scrambling
was never heard or seen in that part of the country. The young men did not
desert their partners, but shoved them up the slide again with great alacrity.
The whole party were bunged up amazing. Eyes and ears and noses and hands and
legs began to swell, and they never got to see the moon at all. The girls cried
with anguish and the boys moaned and groaned and these was no ammonia, no soda,
no doctor and no house within a mile. They could just see enough to find the
horses and by the time they got back home some were blind in one eye and some
in both, and you couldn’t tell a hand from afoot, nor a nose from a turnip
beet, nor the ankle from a calf—calf of the leg, I meant. Well, they got home
about midnight and that 5-mile ride was the longest and most miserable of their
lives. The young men have not yet reported for duty nor have the girls dared to
look into a mirror, for fear of breaking it. It is a wonder that those girls
with such thin apparel were not stung to death, but I suppose that the stuffing
and padding about the breastworks saved them.
We old school boys know something about yellow jackets. It
is bad enough to tackle a nest in the daytime in open ground where you can run
and fight. But to slide down into one near the water on a dark night must be
awful in the extreme. The last time I came in conflict with the spiteful
things, I located the nest and went to the house and got the wife fly catcher
and set it over the hole. It worked beautifully and was filling up when an
outsider too me, “ker-bim,” on the back of the neck, and I departed those
coasts with alacrity. By and by the boys came and built a little fire not far
away and set the fly catcher over the smoke and killed the whole concern. But
you must look for the outsiders—the scouts and sharp shooters. Bees can’t sting
but one time, but the jacket can keep up as long as the poison lasts. The sting
of a bee is bad, that of a jacket is badder. And a wasp is the baddest of all,
except a hornet or, perhaps, the devil’s packsaddle on a fodder blade. They do
say in Texas that a tarantula is worse than all the rest put together and
frequently proves fatal. They say, too, that any sting is a cure for the
rheumatism, but I never found a man that had tried it. Some poisons affect one
person more than another. A good citizen of this country died in 24 hours from
a bee sting, but my faithful servant, Tip, can take them up in his hands and
let them “lite” on his neck and face and sting him furiously, and he brushed
them off and laughs and says they tickle him. I have picked the stings off his
flesh by the dozen, and he has never had rheumatism. A colony of honey bees
number 5,000, yellow jackets 500, and hornets 200.
But this is enough about such pesky things, though the sting
of a mosquito seems to be attracting much attention from the men of science.
But I was ruminating about things that have to be done
before long. My wife says it is about time to make a lettuce bed for the
winter’s supply and it is about time to transplant two or three rows of
strawberry plants from our own runners, for it is a good plan to have some new
ones coming on every year. I receive so many letters from good women asking
about how to grow them and so forth, that I will says briefly:
Prepare the ground about like you would for any garden herb
or vegetable, fork deep and manure liberally, open a furrow and scatter ashes
in it—any kind of ashes, wood, coal or mixed. If you can’t sift the ashes, be
sure and throw out the cinders and lumps. Place the plants about a foot apart,
spread out the roots, draw the earth around lightly. If ground is dry, use
water to each plant, then pull some dry earth over the wet. That’s all. Have
the rows two feet apart. If you have no plants of your own, then order some, and get Brandywine, Lady Thompson,
Gaudy and Excelsion. There are several other good kinds, but I know what these
are. If ashes are scarce, use a good handful to each plant. Stable manure makes
the plant grow and ashes makes the fruit.
Let me make another suggestion to these good women. If you
have no asparagus bed, make one this fall. It is the cheapest thing grown, and
about the best. We had it in abundance all the spring and are now having a
second crop. Buy one or two hundred crowns at 75 cents a hundred, plant about
like you would plant strawberries. Don’t dig any ditch as they used to do. Give
a good coat of manure every fall or winter and the same bed will last you 20
years. Fork up the ground once or twice a year, but do not fork too close to
the crowns.
One other thing and I am done. Plant the small butter bean.
It is sometimes called the see-wee bean. It is sure and prolific and keeps on
bearing until frost. It will take an arbor or very stout poles to hold up the
fines.
That’s all.
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