Madame Eulalie’s Rare PlumsVanity Fair (UK), August 18, 1904
[See attribution note on Vanity Fair menu page]
In the Stocks.
THE Czar has put a million roubles into the bank for his infant son, to give him a sort of start in life. The clerks of the bank refer to the sum as “The Fresh Heir Fund.”
• • • • •
General Stoessel has declined to surrender Port Arthur. “Decline” is an ominous word. It is usually associated with “fall.”
• • • • •
A contemporary has an article headed “The Devastating Course of Musical Comedy.” Many people would have made that title shorter by one letter.
• • • • •
America has been complaining bitterly of the reduction of fares on ocean liners. Their worst fears are now realised. Three Irish M.P.’s left Liverpool last Thursday.
• • • • •
There still seem to be people in London who have never heard a gramophone. How else can we account for the fact that a body of passers-by deliberately helped the other day to extinguish a fire which promised to destroy a whole shop-full of the lethal machines?
• • • • •
We knew that it must come sooner or later. A pamphlet has been published suggesting that Shakespeare wrote the greater part of Bacon’s Essays. It recalls Mr. Jerome K. Jerome’s story of how he adopted a stage name, and thought it a very good one until he met a man of that name who had borrowed his (Mr. Jerome’s) name for stage purposes. Shakespeare, it seems, was Bacon’s nom de plume, and Bacon was Shakespeare’s.
• • • • •
SIC TRANSIT.
(“The statement of Mr. Daniel Sully that he intends to re-enter the cotton gamble is not treated seriously in Chicago.”)
It’s rather hard upon a man
Who’s always done what in him lay
To wreck the struggling worker’s home,
And take the poor man’s bread away,
To find when, having had a rest,
He awakens, so to speak, from slumber,
He is not treated with respect,
But looked upon as a back number.
It almost fills one with despair.
It’s very much to be deplored
That honest effort should be met
With such inadequate reward;
It damps the ardour of a man;
When all is said and all is done,
What is the good of taking pains,
If this is all that’s thought of one?
Illustrious Sully, strive no more
To wipe away your last defeat;
Just leave the cotton ring alone,
And shake its dust from off your feet.
Life offers other walks than this;
Look round about you, and you’ll find
Plenty of other ways in which
To be a nuisance to mankind.
• • • • •
Never was the bull-dog spirit of the true Briton more admirably exemplified than in the case of a certain man of Burnley, who lived, with his wife and eight children, in one room. Some men would have complained. They would have said that it was stuffy, that it was hot, that if they were suddenly seized with a desire to swing a cat they would he thwarted by the fact that there was no space for the manœuvre. Not so he of Burnley. It seemed to him that the room was empty to the point of dreariness. So he took in lodgers, and is now as happy and contented as you please. He always was one for Society, he says.
• • • • •
It is not often that a man’s name fits him so admirably as does that of Phineas Greatheart, of Montana. There is nothing small or mean about Phineas. The other day he shot a man. It turned out that he had been hasty, and that his victim, whatever his other merits, was not the friend he had intended to shoot. Phineas did not hesitate a moment. It is never pleasant to admit that one has been in the wrong, but he felt that it was his duty, and duty must be done. He apologised to the widow.
• • • • •
Arrested for cutting telegraph wires, a Mexican pleaded that he had done no harm to anybody. For weeks, he said, he had watched the wires with the utmost vigilance, and he had never seen anything go across them.
• • • • •
The death is reported of the oldest Sunday School teacher in the world. For forty years he was always at his post punctually. It is the irony of fate that such a man should now be referred to as “the late” Mr. Blank.
Rasper.
Printed unsigned in Vanity Fair; entered by Wodehouse as “In the Stocks” for this date in Money Received for Literary Work. It is possible that not all individual items are by Wodehouse.