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RISE AND FALL OF THE MUSTACHE

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BY ROBERT J. BURDETT.

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“RD ARDPARRAADSPAARIAT ESAS RASA RAARADADARARRALDLANY oe

As Nis khowtettge Droadens, his human

superstition develops itself. He has a

formula, repeating which nine times a

day, while psinting his finger fixedly to-

ward th sun, will cause warts to disap-

pear from the hand, or, to use his own

impression, will ‘‘knock warts.’’ If the eight day clock at home tells him it is two o'clock, and the flying leaves of the

dandelion declares it is half-past five, he

will stand or fall with the dandelion. He has a formula, by which anything that has been lost may be found. He has,

above all things, a natural infallible in stinct for the woods, and can no more be lost in them than a squirrel. If the cow does not come home—and if she is a town cow, like a town man, she does not come home, three nights in the week— you lose half a day of valuable time looking for her. Then you pay a man three dollars to look for her two days longer, or so long the appropriation holds out. Finaily, a quarter sends a boy to the woods; he came back at milk-

as

ing time, whistling the tune that no man ever imitated, and the cow ambles contentedly along before him. He has

one particular masble which he regards with about the same superstitious rever- ence that a pagan does his idol, and his Sunday school teacher can't drive it out of him, either. Carnelian, crystal, bulls- eye, china, pottery, boly, blood alley or commie, whatever he may call it, there is ‘‘luck in it."? When he loses this mar- ble, he sees panic and bankruptcy ahead of him, and retires from business pru- dently, before the crash comes, in true business style, with both pockets and a cigar box full of winnings, and a credi- tor’s meeting in the back room. A boy's world is open to no one bit a boy. You never really revisit the glimpses of your boyhood, much as you may dream of it. After you get into a tail-coat, and tight boots, you never again set foot in boy world. You lose his marvelous instinct for the wocds, you can’t tell a pig-nut tree from a pecan; you can’t make friends with strange dogs; you can’t make the terrific noises with your mouth, you can't invent the unimitable signals or the characteristic catchwords of boy- hood. He is getting on, is your boy. He reaches the dime novel age. He wants to be a missionary. or a pirate. So far as he @xpresses any preference, he would rather be a pirate, an occupation in which there are more chances for making money, and fewer opportunities for be- ing devoured. He developes a yearning love for school and study about this time, also, and every time he dreams of being a pirate he dreams of hanging his dear teacher at the yard arm in the presence of the delighted scholars. His voice developes, even more rapidly and thoroughly than his morals. In the yard, on the house top, down the street,around

the corner; wherever there is a patch of ice big enough for him to break his neck on, or a pond of water deep enough to drown in,,/the voice of your boy is heard He whispers in a shout, and converses in ordinary, confidential moments ina shriek. He exchanges bits of back-fence gossip about his father’s domestic mat- ters with the koy living in the adjacent township, to which interesting revela- tions of home life the intermediate neighborhood listens with intense satis- faction, and the two home circles in helpless dismay He hasan unconquer- able hatred for company, and an aver- sion for walking down stairs. For a year or two his feet never touch the stairway in his descent, and his habit of polish- ing the stair rail by using it as a passen- ger tramway, soon breaks the other members of the family of the careless habit of setting the hall lamps or the water pitcher on the baluster post. He wears the same size boot as his father, and on the dryest, dustiest days in the year always manages to convey some mud on the carpets. He carefully steps over the door mat, and until he is about seventeen years old, he actually never knew there was a scraper at the front porch. About this time, bold but inartis- tic pencil sketches break out mysterious- ly on the alluring background of the wall paper. He asks, with great regularity, alarming frequency, and growing diffi- dence, for 4 new hat. You might as well buy him « new disposition. He wears his hat inthe air and on the ground far more than he does on his head, and he never hangs it up that he dvesn’t pull the hook through’ the crown; uniess the hook breaks off or tie hat rack pulls ever. He isa perfect Robinson Crusoe in inventive genius. He can make a kite that will tly higher aud pull harder than u balloon. He can, and, on occasion will, take out a couple of the pantry shelves and makea sled that is amazement it- self. The mouse-trap he builds out of the water pitcher and the family Bible isa marvel of mechanical ingenuity. is the excuse he gives for such a_ selection of raw material. When suddenly, some Monday morning, the clothes line, with- out any just or apparent cause or provo- cation, shrinks sixteen feet, philosophy can not make you believe that Prof. Tice did it with his little barometer. Because, far down im the dusty street, you can see Tom in the dim distance, driving a Prancing team, six-in-hand, with the missing link.. You send him on an er- rand, There are three ladies in the par- lor. You have waited, as long as you can for them to go. They have developed alarming symptoms of staying to tea. You know there aren’t half enough strawberries to go around. It is only three minutes walk to the grocery, however, and Torn sets off like a rocket, and you are so pleased with his celerity and ready good naturé that you want to run efter him and kiss him. He is gone 4 long time, however. Ten minutes be come fifteen, fifteen grow into twenty; the twenty swells into the half hour, aod your guests exchange very signifi- ant glances as the half hour becomes three-quarters, Your boy returns at last, 4}prehensian is his dayvenenct crac bumil-

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frHRE DAILY EXAMINEP, CHARLOTTET WN, JANUARY 7, 1898

ry in his fuggard step, nenitence in the appealing slouch of his battered hat, and a pound and a half of shingle nails in his hands. ‘‘Mother,’’ he says, ‘‘what else was it yon told me to get besides the nails?’’ And while you are counting your scanty store of berries to make them go round without a fraction, you hear Tom out in the back yard whistling

and humming away, building a dog house with the nails you never told him to get.

Poor Tom, he loves at this age quite

as ardently as he makes mistakes and mischief. He is repulsed quite as ardent- ly as he makes love. If he hugs his sis- ter, he musses her rnffle, and gets cuffed for it. Two hours later another boy, not more than twenty-two or twenty -three years older than Tom, some _ neighbor’s Tom, will come in,and will just make the most hopeless, terrible chaotic wreck of

the ruffle that lace or ruching can be dis- . st | The only reproof be gets is |

torted into. the reprouchful murmur, ‘‘Must he go when he doesn’t make a move to go until he hears the alarm clock go off upstairs and the old gentleman in the adjoining room banging around building the morning fires, and loudly wondering if young Mr. Bostwick is going to stay to break fast.

so soon?’’

Tom is at this age set in deadly en- mity against company, which he soon learns to wvegard as his mortal foe. He

regards company as a mysterious and eminently respectable delegation that al- ways stays to dinner, invariably crowds him to the second table, never leaves him any of the pie, and generally makes him late for school. Naturally, he learns to love refined society. but in a conserva- tive, non-committal sort of a way, dis- semblirg his love so effectually that even his parents never dream of its existence until it is gone.

Poor Tom, his life is not all comedy at this period. Go up to your boy’s room

some night, and his sleeping face will |

preach you asermon on the griefs and troubles that sometimes weigh his iittle heart down almost to breaking, eloquently that the lips of a Spurgeon or a Talmage could picture them. The cur- tain has fallen on one day’s act in the drama of his active little life. The rest- less feet that all day long have pattered so far—down dusty streets, over scorch- ing pavements, through long stretches of quiet wooded lanes, along the winding cattle paths in the deep silent woods; that have dabbled in the cool brook where it wrangles and scolds over the si#ning pebbles, that have filled your house with noise and dusk and racket, are still. The stained hand outside the sheet is soiled and rough, and the cut finger with the rude bandage of the bhoy’s own surgery, pleads with a mute, effec- tive pathos of its own, for the mischiev- ous hand that is never idle. On the brown cheek the trace of a tear marks the piteous close of the day’s trouble, the closing scene in a troubled little drama; trouble at school with books that were too many for him; trouble with tempta- tions to have unlawful fun that were too strong for him, as they are frequently too strong for the father; treable in the street with boys that were two big for him; and at last in his home in his ecas- tle, his refuge, trouble has pursued him until, feeling utterly friendless and in everybody’s way, he has crawled off to the dismantled den, dignified usually by the title of ‘‘the boy’s reom,’’ and his over-charged heart has welled up into his eyes, and his last waking breath has broken into sob and just as he begins to think that after all life is only one broad sea of trouble, whose restless bil- lows, in never-ending succession, wreak and beat and double and dash upon the short shore line of a boy’s life, he has drifted away into the wonderland of a boy’s sleep, where fairy fingers picture his dreams. How soundly, deeply, peace- fully he sleeps. No mother who has

never dragged a sleepy boy off the lounge at 9 o’clock, and hauled him off upstairs to bed, can know with what a herculean grip a square sleep takes hold of a bo#’s senses, nor how fearfully and wonderfully limp and nerveless it makes 1im; ner how, in direct all established laws of anatomy, it de- velops joints that work both ways, all the way up and down that boy. What

pen can portray the wonderful enchant- ;

ments of a boy’s dreamland! No marvel- sus visions wrought by the weird, strange power of hasheesh, no dreams that come to the sieep of jaded woman or tired roan, no ghastly specters that dance at- tendance upon cold mince pie, but shrink into tiresome, commonplace compared «with the mar- velous, the grotesque, the wonderful, the terrible, the beautiful and the en- chanting scenes and people of a boy's dreamland. This may ‘be owing ina great measure to the fact that the boy

never relates hisdream until all the other

members of the family have related theirs; and then he comes in, like a back township, with the mecessary mia- jority; like the directory of a western city, following the cemeus of a rival tow n.

Tom is a miniature Ishmaelite at this period of his career. His hand is against every man, and about every man’s hand and nearly every woman's hand, is against him, off and on. Often, and then the iron enters his soul, the hand that is against him holds the slipper. He wears his mother’s slipper om his jacket quite as often as she wears it on her foot. Yhis is all wrong and impolitic. It spreads the slipper and discourages the boy. Then he reads in his Sunday school lesson that the wicked stand in slippery places, he takes it as a direct personal reference, and he is affronted, and maybe the seeds of athéis:n are implanted in his breast. Moreover, this repeated applica- tion of the slipper not only sours his temper, and gives a bias to his moral ideas, but it sharpens his wits. How many a Christian mother, her eyes swim- ming in tears of real pain that plashed up from the depths of a loving heart, as she bent over her wayward boy until his heartrending wails and piteous shrieks drowned her choking, sympathetic sobs, has been wasting her strength, and wearing out a good slipper, and pouring «ut all that priceles* flood of mother love and dtty and pity and tender sympathy upon a conceaied atlas-back or # good shingle.

It isa historical fact that po how ie

more |

antagonism to

stale and trifling |

ever Wiilppeu vwice lor precisely tne si.ijwe }

offence. He varies and improves a little on every repetition of the prank, until at

t he renches a point where detection is almost impossible. He is a _ big boy then, and glides almost imperceptibly from the discipline of his father, under the surveillance of the police.

By easy stages he passes into the un comfortable period of boyhood. His jac ket developes into a coat-tail. The boy of to-day, who is slipped into a hollow,

abbreviated mockery of a coat tail, when he is taken out of idea—not the faintest conception of the grandeur the momentous importance of the epoch in a boy's life that was marked by the transition from the old-fashioned cadet roundabout to the coat-tail. It is an experience that heaven, ever chary of its choicest blessings, and mindful of the

long dresses, has no

decadence of the race of boys, has not vouchsafed to the untoward, forsaken boys of this wicked generation When

the roundabout went out of fashion, the

heroic race of boys passed away from | earth, and weeping nature sobbed and broke the moulds. The fashion that

started a boy of six years on his pilgrim- |

age of life in a miniature edition of his father’s coat, marked a period of retro- gression in the affairs of men, and stamped a decaying and degenerate race. There are no boys now, or very few at least, such as peopled the grand old earth when the men

And that it is so, society is to be con- zratulated. The step from the round- about to the tail-coat was a leap in life.

it was the boy Julus, doffing the prae- texta and flinging upon his shoulders the toga virilis of Julius; Patroclus, donning the armor of Achillis, in which to go forth and be Hectored to death.

Tom is slow to realize the grandeur of that tail-coat, however, on its trial teip. How different it feels from his good, snug-fitting, comfortable old jac- ket. It fits him too much in every direc- tion, he Knows. Every now and thon he stops, with a gasp of terror, feeling posi- tive, from the awful sensation of noth- ingness about the neck, that the entire collar has fallen off in the street. The tails are prairies, the pockets are cav- erns, and the back is one vast, illimit- able, stretching waste. How ‘Tom slides along as close te the fenee as he can scrape, and what a wary eye he keeps in every direction, for other boys. When he forgets the school, he is half tempted to feel proud of his toga; but when he thinks of the boys, and the reception that awaits him his heart sinks, and he is tempted to go back home, sneak up- stairs, and rescue his old worn-out jacket from the rag-bag. He glances in terror at his distorted shadew on the fence, and, confident that itis a faithful outline of his figure, he knows that he has worn his father’s coat off by mistake. He tries various methods of buttoning his coat, to make it conform more harmoriously to his figure and his idea of the eternal fitness of things. He buttons jest the lower button and immediately it flies all abroad at the shoulders, and he be- helds himself an exaggerated mannikin of ‘‘Capt. Cattle.*’ Then he fastens just the upper buttom, and the frantic tails flap and flutter like a clothes line in a eyelone. Then he buttons it ali up, a la militiare, and tries to look soldierly, but this is so theological-studently that it frightens him until his heart stops beat- ing. As he reaches the last friendly corner that shields him from the pitiless gaze of the -beys he can hear howling and shrieking not fifty yards away, he pauses to give the final adjustment to the manly and unmanageable raiment. It is bigger and looser, flappier and wrinklier than ever. New and startling folds, and unexpected wrinkles, and uncontemplated bulges develop them- seives, like masked batteries, just where and when their effect will be most de- moralizing. A new horror discloses itself at this trying and awful juncture. He wants to ie down on the sidewalk and try to die. For the first time he notices the coior of his cont. Hideows! He has been duped, swinaled, betrared—mude a monstrous idiot by that silver-toncued salesman, Wao has pulmed eff upon him

a coat 2.000 yeara cli; a coat that. the most sweetly enthusiastic and terribly misinformed women’s missionary society

would hesitate to offer a wild Hottentot:

ind which tbe most benighted old-fash- ioned Hovteatot that ever disdained slothes. would certainly blush to wear in the dark, and would probably decline with thanks. Oh, madness! The eolar is

ao color. It is al! colors. it is a Lrindsk

--a veritable, undeniable brindle. Th. r must have been a fiabulous amount 0} brindle cloth made up into Loy’s firs: outs, a iewW years ago, because ost Ol ¢4—I like to be exact in the use oi figwes because nothing else in the wo. lu lends such an air of profcurnd truvkful ness to a discourse—out of 894 ioys i knew in their first tail coat period, $93 same to school in brindle coats. Th> ther one--the 894th boy—made his wretcned debut in a_ bottle-green toga

with creadful glaring brass buttons. He ieft school very suddenly, and we always believed that the angels saw him in thai soat, anc ran away with him. But Torn, shivering with apprehension, and faint with mortification over the discovery of this new horror, gives one last despair- ing scroch of his shouiders, to make the coat look shorter, and, with a firal frantic tug at the to make itip pear longer, steps out from the prote :t- ing aegis of the corner, is stunned with a vocal hurricane of ‘‘Oh, what a coat,’’ and his cup of misery is as full as a rag- bag in three minutes.

Passing into the tail-coat peried, Tom awakens toa knowledge of the broad physical truth that he has hands. He is not very positive in his own mind how many. At times he is ready to swear to an even two; ene pair; good hands. Again, when cruel fate and the non-azp- pearance of some one else’s brother has compelled him to accompany his sister to a church sociable, he can see eleven; and as he sits bolt upright up against the wall, as the ‘‘sociable’’ custom is, or used to be, trying to find enough unoccu- pied pockets in which to sequester all his hands, he is dimly conscious that hands should come in pairs, and vague- ly wonders if he has only five pair of regularly ordained hands, where this odd hand came from.

Hitherto Tom has been content to engise his feet 4n anything that would

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of qur age were boys. |

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stay on fhetti. Ndw; however, he ‘ha’ an eye for a glove-fitting boot, and learns to wreath his face in smiles, hollow, heart- less, deceitful smiles, while his boots are as full of agony as a broken heart, and his tortured feet cry out for vengeance upon the shoemaker, and Tom feels that life isa hollew mockery and there is nothing real but soft corns and bunions.

And; His mother never cuts his h: ir again. Never. When Tom assumes tae manly gown she has looked her last upen his head with trimming ideas. His hair will be trimmed and clipped, bar- berously it may be, but she will not be

ac-cissory before the fact. She may sometimes long to have her boy kneel down before her, while she gnaws

around his terrified locks with a pair of scissors that were sharpened when they were made; and have since then cut acres of calics, and miles and miles of paper, and great stretches of cloth. and snarls and coils of string; and furlongs of lamp wick; and have snuffed candles; and dug refractory corks out ot the fam- ily ink bottle; and punched holes in skate straps; and trimmed the family nails; and have even done their level best, at the annual struggle, to cut stove pipe lengths in two; and have success- fully opened oyster and fruit cans; and pried up carpet tacks; and have many a time and oft gone snarlingly and_toil- somely around Tom’s head, and made him an object of terror to the children in the street, and made him look so much like a yearling colt with the run of & burr pasture, that people have been afraid to approach him too sudden- ly, lest he should jump through his collar end rpn avmy, . (lo be Continued.)

a

Peaceable men don’t like to carry weapons, but there are times when a weapon saves a man’s life. Sensible people don’t like to be al- ways taking medicine ;—it is like flourishing fire-arms on every needless occasion,— but the right medicine at the right time is often a genuine life-saver.

When your constitution is over-taxed by worry or extra work, or weak- ened by an attack of indigestion or bilious- ness; or whenever your natural energies are not quite up to the mark and fail to respond to the demands upon them, Dr. Pierce’s Golden Medical Discovery will meet the emergency promptly, nk save you from dangerous or ——— fatal illness.

It wards off disease by acting directly upon the vital organs where disease origi- nates, It restores the liver’s capacity to filter poisonous impurities out of the blood, and empowers the digestive organs to ex- tract from the food those nourishing vitaliz- ing elements which drive out disease-germs, repair wasted tissucs and build up healthy flesh and muscular /orce.

It is the most thoroughly scientific and effectual alterative remedy ever discovered in the whole history of medicine, and one of Dr. Pierce’s most valuable contributions

to Materia Medica during his thirty years |

service as chief consulting physician to the Invalids’ Hotel and Surgical Institute of Buffalo, N. Y.

Mrs. A. 1. Gibbs, of Russellville, Logan Co.. Ky.. writes: “I can heartily recommend your ‘Golden Medical Discovery’ to any one who is troubled with indigestion and torpid liver. 1 was so bad I could not lie on my left side and could scarcely eat anything. I had a dull aching and pain in my stomach all the time. Now it is all gone after taking one bottle of your ‘Golden Medical Discovery.’ ”’ :

- . . ( Constipation is the commonest beginning

and first cause of many serious diseases and it should always be treated with Dr. Pierce’s Pleasant Pellets used in connection with the ‘“ Discovery.’’ These are the most perfect natural laxatives and permanently cure.

what the Growing Generation Wants.

There is one great fault with the grow- ing generation. The young men went to ect rich too fast. With wealth going to waste all around them they cannot find it in their soulsto be patient. They are not content to plod along as their fathers did before them and slowly lay upyafortune. They must have it now, today, this instant. When they go into un enterprise, they want capital and lots of it. They went to begin on 6 dig scale and electrify the world.

It is not the age of saving, but of

spending. Speculation is the craze of the hour. Livery man wants to make

more th4a he can earn by the sweat of his brow. He must double his money in a night and quadruple it the next day. It is an altogether artificial existence. Contentment is not sought nowadays. All that men want is excitement.—New York Tribune,

MESSAGE TO WEN

—-

Proving that True sonesty and True Phil antrophy still Exists

If avy man whoix weak, nervous and debilitated, or who is suffering frow any ef the var.oas troubles resulting from youthful tolly, excesses or overwork, will take heart and write to me, I will send him confidentially and free of charge the plan pursued by which I wax completely restor- ed to perfect bealth and mavhood, after years of suffering from Nervons Debility, loss of Vigor aud Organtic Weakness,

I have nothing to sell and therefore wantno money, but asI know through my own experience how to +ympathize with euch sufferere, I am giad to be able to assist any fellow-beipgs toa cure. | am well aware of the prevalence of qai: k- ery, for I myse}f was deceived and im por- ed upon until I nearly Jost faith in man- kind but I rejoice to ray that] am vow perfectly weli aud happy once more and am desirous theretore tu mabe this certain means of cure known toall. Ifyou will write to me you can rely upon being cured and the proud satisfaction of having been of great service to one in need will be sufficient reward for my trouble. Absol- ute sccrecy assured, Send Se silver to cover postage snd address Mr. G, Strong, North Rockland, M:ch. 125 p & w.

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=~ 1898-= stocktaking Sale

Before stocktaking we offer the balance of our stock or men’s ulsters and overcoats, at clearance prices. If you want one, you will get a snap— at the price you can buy here for now.

A lot of boys and youths Ul!sters, at about half price $5.57 for $2 95, and so on.

BOOTS, BOOTS, this way for Boots. Ifyou want your boots at lowest prices, come this way,

J. . Macdonald&Co

For Greatest Bargains in Boots and Clothing Meee me et ee a ent Fein i ia

— — ——-— —_———$—$$—$—$— rr

200 Bicycles Wanted

To be stored (free of charge) for the winter, and cleaned repaired, nickeled or enameled, thoroughly renewed, ready

for spring. ENAMELING

We use the highest grade Enamel (black or colors) that money can buy in New York, and dase it on in a manner that the most fastidiovs cannot criticize, and the cost is the same: as others charge for ordinary paint, See sample at shop.

WP. DOULL, Kent Sneet

rae Reasons

Why you should buy your Furniture from us.

lst,—Our variety is unsurpassed, as we buy our goods from specialists in each line.

2nd —We buy nothing but the best.

3rd.—We sell our good furniture at tke price of cheap.

PROVE US “=

‘JOHN NEWSON,

eller of Good Furniture. tranger to Poor Furniture

Cad a

ladies’ jacket

of our sock

3

We offer them at of above sacrifice all-new: this fall’s importation with the

exception

prices to clear

at once [t will pay any buyer

to see them

London House

<r.

of six

T. J. HARRIS, NOTHING MORE SUITABLE

for a Christmas 2ift__—_£ 2,

Than a pair of Kid Shoes or slippers, for either. lady-or gentlemen for boys or girls, a pair of Hockey or Skating Boots We show some nice lines of ladies and geutlemens slippers, overshoes Felt boots at low prices.

ait ers,.

W. H. Stewart & 60