Wood County reporter. [volume] (Grand Rapids [i.e. Wisconsin Rapids], Wis.) 1857-1923, 1876-01-13
Chumship.

To BE chumless is not quite the same
thing as to be friendless, although it is
generally taken as verbal synonym and
parallel condition. On the one hand
you may have an abundance of friends,
yet there shall not be a chum of the right
sort among them; on the other, you may
have chum whom, in your secret heart,
you do not count as friend, though, for
the convenience Of life and perhaps by the
necessities of your position, you are
closely associated together, and fulfill all
the external conditions of the order. This,
however, is an exceptional arrangement;
and your chum is for the most part your
real friend in the best sense-at least for
the time being-yOur favorite companion,
your trusted confidant, and that alter eco
whom it is one of the greatest joys of life
and the sweetest sOOther Of its troubles to
possess.
Community of pursuits and harmony
Of tastes make excellent foundation for
chumship. Girls and boys at school,
youths and maidens at college, men with
hobby and women with an object, are
sure to find a choice of chums among
their associates, with whom they have
no more trouble than that involved in Sc
lection and appointment-the trouble of
Capt. Macheath when he sings his famous
song and processes both his impartiality
and his difficulties. Almost all our girls
who have gone in, as the phrase goes,
for the higher education, and who live in
some things the lives Of young men rather
than the woman as we have hitherto
known her, have their chums specially
chosen and appointed. Classmates, and
in part friendly rivals, they stir each
other up and help each other on; nearer
than sisters, they share each others
thoughts and are made partakers of
the hopes and fears, the dreams and de-
sires, that alternately paint in the future
with rose color or blot out the sun with
clouds; friends and companions, they
travel on life's highway for the moment
side by side and are all that the condition
of chumship would have them. But it
does not last. When the school is dis
carded for the college and the college
gives place to the profession the chum of
the younger days tails into the oblivion
that overtakes the well-thummed class
| book and the blurred and blotted notes ::
others rise up in her place-for the insti-
tuition is as permanent as the per-
sonallty is temporary; and the rising
| young music teacher or the busy young
| artist has to find a companion to
supplement rather than to rival, and
harmony in divergence Of pursuits rather
than in their likeness and accord. How
| often we see among these semi-profession-
al girls, who live out of the family and
| make their own bread in independent
methods, that two unite in housekeeping,
| whereof the one goes out and the other
stays at home-the one is the bread-win-
ner out OF doors and the other rather the
distributor within. There are strange
little households held in this great
city of ours in odd out-of-the-way
streets and top floors Of dingy houses; and
among them are the small and scarcely
satisfactory homes made by the young
women who have to get their living by
work either when they are two chums
together or when they are solitary and
chumless. For the former there is at
least the semblance of a home. When
the young music teacher comes in from
her dreary tramp through the winters
cold and mud she finds her chum, the
artist, who has done her work within the
four walls of home, with cheerful fire
and the tea all ready, waiting to welcome
and receive.-LondOn Queen