Eating milk toast with a spoon and stopping between each mouthful to swear!  That was what I saw and heard a brawny man doing not long since in a popular down-town restaurant.  The action and the manner of speech did not harmonize.  If I felt it borne in upon me that I must be a profane fellow to prove my manliness, I would choose another diet than spoon victuals to nourish my formidable zest for naughtiness.  Rare beef or wild game would be less incongruous.  There are times when a man may be excused for using objectionable language.  Stress of righteous indignation, seasons of personal conflict with hansom cabmen, large-headed street car conductors, ubiquitous, never-dying expectorators and many other particular forms of torment may make a man swear a bit now and then, but what shall we say of a bearded creature with the dew of a babe’s food upon his chin who rends the placid air with unnecessary cursing?  Sew up his lips with a surgeon’s needle and throw him into the fool-killer’s bag!

LIX.

Boys, you know I like you.

Boys, you know I like you and will stand a good deal of your swaggering ways.  I like to see how fresh you are, and do not want to have you salted down too early by the processes of life.  But one thing let me ask you.  Don’t wear silk hats before the down is fully apparent upon your chin.  If there is an embarrassing sight left to one grown wan and worn in watching the foolishness of folly, it is the sight of a stripling in a plug hat.  I would rather see a yearling colt hauling lumber, or a babe in arms scanning Homer.  It is cruel; it is premature.  Be a boy until you are fit to be a man, and hold to a boy’s mode of dress at least until you are old enough to command the respect of sensible girls by something more notable than cigarette smoking and athletic sports.

LX.

What to do with growlers.

I often hear people making a big fuss about little things.  My path in life leads me among many “kickers” and many “growlers.”  Do you know what I would like to do with some of these malcontents and whiners?  I would like to send them up for a week to watch life in the county hospital.  I would like to seat them by a bedside where a noble woman lies dying all alone of a terrible disease.  I would like to have them become acquainted with her bravery and the more than queenly calm with which she confronts her destiny.  I would like to have them linger in the corridors and hear the moans from the wards and private rooms where the maimed and the crippled and the incurable are faintly struggling in the grasp of death.  I would like to lead them through the children’s ward, where mites of humanity cursed with heredity’s blight, removed from a mother’s bosom, consigned to suffering throughout the span of their feeble days, lie faintly breathing their lives away.  And then would like to say to them:  “You contemptible cowards, you abominable fussers, you inexcusable kickers, see what the Lord might bring you to if he unloosed the leash and set real troubles in your track.  Quit complaining and go to thanking heaven for all your unspeakable mercies!”