St. Johnsbury Caledonian. [volume] (St. Johnsbury, Vt.) 1867-1919, 1882-12-15
VOLUME 46---NUMBER 1868.

doctors and poor preachers and poor
editors. If you have tn choose between
poor lawyer and good deck hand.
be good deck hand every time.
few years ago | went into the Nor
ton nail mill, at Ashland, Kentucky. |
saw there machine that could make
nails. looked ut it and admired it,
thought, and | still think, that machine
ought to go to Congress. All its talent
and all its energies are directed at one
point. 1t can make nails, and it can't
do one solitary other thing under the
sun. 1t never talks politics. 1t can't
carry torch. 1t doesn't know what "a
caucus is. lteven doesn't know enough
to go out with II candidate and take a
drink. 1t doesn't want, and il never
did want the government to issue 400
0OO, 900 kegs of lath nails and loan them
to citizens who want to build chicken
houses. 1t never stopped work to sit
down on dry goods box on IL shady
corner to declare this country would
never he prosperous and happy until
we had an incontrovertible currency of
shingle nails, secured by Il bonded fund
of non-interest- bearing spikes. Ii new
er once got loose ard ran wildly about
the country, frantically calling upon
the people to rally to its support as the
only means of Overthrowing the "nia-
chine" 1t just stayed in the mill and
made nails and nails and nails Ii knew
how to make them. and so it just went
ahead and made them.
Well, | once knew "a man who could
make shoes. He could build you "A pair
of gloVe-litting boots with cunning lit
| tie closets for all your corns, and
lovely bay window for your bunion.
He could sew on an invisible patch with
yellow thread, so that it looked like
sunset on the Mississippi. How he
could make shoes And he sat with
his mouth full of pegs and sung and
whIstled, happy and cOntcnted, and he
pounded leather and smOte the insen-
safe lapstOne with many IA mullied
blow, and pegged and stitched away
as though that was the chief end of
| man.
But one day he stopped whistling,
laid down his hammer, dropped his
wax into the pan full of pegs, threw
! the lapStone into the water bucket,
blew all the pegs ont of his mouth. and
got to telling what congress ought to
do, and what the government should
do, and what he would do if he were
there, and he said it so well, that ev-
erybody saw the country was going to
ruin and he was the only man who
could stop it, and the first thing he
knew the people took him off his leath-
er bench and sent him to congress.
Now, that man used to charge only
ten cents for sewing patch as big as
Il fifty cent piece, and twenty cents for
a new heel, and only fifty cents for half
soles. And day in and day out he
earned about $40 day.
And the very first week he was in
congress, he introduced bill for the
free coinage of 5000, ,0OO, ,0OO, 600 in one
dollar greenbacks, with provisO that
this issue should be doubled if it should
appear that the amount originally spec
flied should be found insufficient to
meet the demands of the shoe trade.
And yet that man was good shoe
maker. The community missed him
sorely when he went to congress 1t
was hard to fill his place-on the shoe
makers bench. Other cObblers came
and went, but not one of them nor all
of them cobbled so well and accepta-
bly, as he, cObble they never so cob
bled. He was good shoemaker, my
boy a most excellent and worthy shoe
maker In all the land of Ithaca, my
boy, there was no better shoemaker.