"_Oh, do not tell me of the charms of maidens far and near, Their charming ways and manners I do not care to hear, For Lucy dear was to me so very, very dear, And they buried her at eight-thirty in the morning_.

3

"_Then it's merrily, merrily, merrily, whoa!

To the old gray church they come and go, Some to be married and some to be buried, And old Robin has gone for the mail_."

"THE OLD KING'S JOKE"

F.J. BRUFF, Hammick, Conn.--In a recent issue of your paper, Lillian F.

Grothman asked for the remainder of a poem which began: "_The King of Sweden made a joke, ha, ha!_"

I can furnish all of this poem, having written it myself, for which I was expelled from St. Domino's School in 1895. If Miss Grothman will meet me in the green room at the Biltmore for tea on Wednesday next at 4:30, she will be supplied with the missing words.

XL

"DARKWATER"

We have so many, many problems in America. Books are constantly being written offering solutions for them, but still they persist.

There are volumes on auction bridge, family budgets and mind-training. A great many people have ideas on what should be done to relieve the country of certain undesirable persons who have displayed a lack of sympathy with American inst.i.tutions. (As if American inst.i.tutions needed sympathy!) And some of the more generous-minded among us are writing books showing our duty to the struggling young nationalities of Europe.

It is bewildering to be confronted by all these problems, each demanding intelligent solution.

Little wonder, then, that we have no time for writing books on the one problem which is exclusively our own. With so many wrongs in the world to be righted, who can blame us for overlooking the one tragic wrong which lies at our door? With so many heathen to whom the word of G.o.d must be brought and so many wild revolutionists in whom must be instilled a respect for law and order, is it strange that we should ourselves sometimes lump the word of G.o.d and the principles of law and order together under the head of "sentimentality" and shrug our shoulders? Justice in the abstract is our aim--any American will tell you that--so why haggle over details and insist on justice for the negro?

But W.E.B. Du Bois does insist on justice for the negro, and in his book "Darkwater" (Harcourt, Brace & Co.) his voice rings out in a bitter warning through the complacent quiet which usually reigns around this problem of America. Mr. Du Bois seems to forget that we have the affairs of a great many people to attend to and persists in calling our attention to this affair of our own. And what is worse, in the minds of all well-bred persons he does not do it at all politely. He seems to be quite distressed about something.

Maybe it is because he finds himself, a man of superior mind and of sensitive spirit who is a graduate of Harvard, a professor and a sincere worker for the betterment of mankind, relegated to an inferior order by many men and women who are obviously his inferiors, simply because he happens to differ from them in the color of his skin. Maybe it is because he sees the people of his own race who have not had his advantages (if a negro may ever be said to have received an advantage) being crowded into an ignominious spiritual serfdom equally as bad as the physical serfdom from which they were so recently freed. Maybe it is because of these things that Mr. Du Bois seems overwrought.

Or perhaps it is because he reads each day of how jealous we are, as a Nation, of the sanct.i.ty of our Const.i.tution, how we revere it and draw a flashing sword against its detractors, and then sees this very Const.i.tution being flouted as a matter of course in those districts where the amendment giving the negroes a right to vote is popularly considered one of the five funniest jokes in the world.

Perhaps he hears candidates for office insisting on a reign of law or a plea for order above all things, by some sentimentalist or other, or public speakers advising those who have not respect for American inst.i.tutions to go back whence they came, and then sees whole sections of the country violating every principle of law and order and mocking American inst.i.tutions for the sake of teaching a "n.i.g.g.e.r" his place.

Perhaps during the war he heard of the b.l.o.o.d.y crimes of our enemies, and saw preachers and editors and statesmen stand aghast at the barbaric atrocities which won for the German the name of Hun, and then looked toward his own people and saw them being burned, disembowelled and tortured with a civic unanimity and tacit legal sanction which made the word Hun sound weak.

Perhaps he has heard it boasted that in America every man who is honest, industrious and intelligent has a good chance to win out, and has seen honest, industrious and intelligent men whose skins are black stopped short by a wall so high and so thick that all they can do, on having reached that far, is to bow their heads and go slowly back.

Any one of these reasons should have been sufficient for having written "Darkwater."

It is unfortunate that Mr. Du Bois should have raised this question of our own responsibility just at this time when we were showing off so nicely. It may remind some one that instead of taking over a protectorate of Armenia we might better take over a protectorate of the State of Georgia, which yearly leads the proud list of lynchers. But then, there will not be enough people who see Mr. Du Bois's book to cause any great national movement, so we are quite sure, for the time being, of being able to devote our energies to the solution of our other problems.

Don't forget, therefore, to write your Congressman about a universal daylight-saving bill, and give a little thought, if you can, to the question of the vehicular tunnel.

XLI

THE NEW TIME-TABLE

The new time-table of the New York Central Railroad (New York Central Railroad, Harlem Division. Form 113. Corrected to March 28, 1922) is an attractive folder, done in black and white, for the suburban trade. It slips neatly into the pocket, where it easily becomes lost among letters and bills, appearing again only when you have procured another.

So much for its physical features. Of the text matter it is difficult to write without pa.s.sion. No more disheartening work has been put on the market this season.

In an attempt to evade the Daylight-Saving Law the New York Central has kept its clocks at what is called "Eastern Standard Time," meaning that it is standard on East 42d Street between Vanderbilt and Lexington Avenues. Practically everywhere else in New York the clocks are an hour ahead.

It is this "Eastern Standard Time" that gives the time-table its distinctive flavor. Each train has been demoted one hour, and then, for fear that it would be too easy to understand this, an extra three or four minutes have been thrown in or taken out, just, so that no mistake can help being made.

In order to read the new time-table understandingly the following procedure is now necessary:

Take a room in some quiet family hotel where the noise from the street is reduced to minimum. Place the time-table on the writing-desk and sit in front of it, holding a pencil in the right hand and a watch (Eastern Christian Time) in the left. Then decide on the time you think you would like to reach home. Let us say that you usually have dinner at 7. You would, if you could do just what you wanted, reach Valhalla at 6:30.

Very well. It takes about an hour from the Grand Central Terminal to Valhalla. How about a train leaving around 5:30?

Look at the time-table for a train which leaves about 2:45 (Eastern Standard Time). Write down, "2:45" on a piece of paper. Add 150.

Subtract the number of stations that Valhalla is above White Plains.

Sharpen your pencil and bind up your cut finger and subtract the number you first thought of, and the result will show the number of Presidents of the United States who have been a.s.sa.s.sinated while in office. Then go over to the Grand Central Terminal and ask one of the information clerks what you want to know.

[Ill.u.s.tration: "Listen, Ed! This is how it goes!"]

They will be glad to see you, for during the last three days they have been actually hungering for the sight of a human face. Sometimes it has seemed to them that the silence and loneliness there behind the information counter would drive them mad. If some one--any one--would only come and speak to them! That is why one of them is over in the corner chewing up time-tables into small b.a.l.l.s and playing marbles with them. He has gone mad from loneliness. The other clerk, the one who is looking at the tip of his nose and mumbling Lincoln's Gettysburg Address, has only a few more minutes before he too succ.u.mbs.

And that low, rumbling sound, what is that? It comes from the crowd of commuters standing in front of the gate of what used to be the 5:56. Let us draw near and hear what they are discussing. Why, it is the new time-table, of all things!

"Listen, Ed. This is how it goes. This train that goes at 4:25 according to this time-table is really the old 5:20. See? What you do is add an hour"--

"Aw, what kind of talk is that? Add an hour to your grandmother! You subtract an hour from the time as given here. This is Eastern Standard Time. See, it says right here: 'The time shown in this folder is Eastern Standard Time, one hour slower than Daylight-Saving Time.' See? One hour slower. You subtract."

"Here, you guys are both way off. I just asked one of the trainmen. The 5:56 has gone. It went at 4:20. The next train that we get is the 6:20 which goes at 5:19. Look, see here. It says 5:19 on the time-table but that means that by your watch it is 6:19"--

"By my watch it is not 6:19. My watch I set by the clock in the station this morning when I came in"--

"Well, the clock in the station is wrong. That is, the clock in the station is an hour ahead of all the other clocks."

"An hour ahead? An hour behind, you mean."

"The clock in the station is an hour ahead. I know what I'm talking about."

"Now listen, Jo. Didn't you see in the paper Monday morning"--