The news & observer. [volume] (Raleigh, N.C.) 1894-current, 1901-07-28
WEATHER PROPHET FACTIONS.
How Corn Cracker Loses Prestige in Church
and State in Cherry Mountain.
Especial to the News and obesrver.)

Especial to the News and Obesryer.)
Polksville, N. c., July 27.--This re-
gion is being visited by abundant rains,
cholera morbus elephants itch. or
small pox, fruit tree agents, wheat
threshers and typhoid fever. Also. the
lightning still gets in its work, albeit
the same is not political lightning, but
the simon pure article of the same brand
with which Benjamin Franklin, Thomas
Edison and others have had a speaking
acquaintance.
One day recently John Bridges, ex
merchant in chief of New House, but
now professor of a saw mill near Ola,
received seven pronged bolt that
knocked out his horse, but had little
effect on the buzz-saw manipulation.
He says he felt queer, but the ex'
perience was mild compared with an
explosion that lifts man through roof
made of inch plank and drops him into
another county. On the same day
Frank Jones, delegate at large from
Indiana, as well as Andrew Jackson
Morrison, postmaster civil engineer and
roller mill magnate of Holly Bush, each
received a jolt from contact with live
noise during a thunder storm.
John d. baltimore and Dolly Dixon,
both Industrious farmers, have been
very low with cholera morbus, as has
r. l.. Washburn, a mounted herb mis-
sionary as fruit agent is called in
the parlance of Cherry Mountain.
/ tried last night to cure the sprout
missionary, but before ! killed him he
managed to secure his "hoss'' and flee
to the Wilderness / have tried to doe
tor several lightning-rod men, range
peddlers. school-supply swindlers, but
they always live in spite of me. The
same course of treatment that would
kill Sunday school superintendent or
4 youth that has symptoms of going
into the ministry, will give a lease of
life to a dude, a revenue officer, or an
agent of any fruit tree establishment,
and a school supply swindler is imper-
vious to any decoction known to any
school of medicine.
In the neighborhood about ten miles
from here, typhoid fever, of very ma
lignant type, is prevalent In two fam
lilies learn that fourteen patients are
reported at the same time.
The doctors of this region and the
weather prophets fail to agree.
out being sworn that we are in the
tolls of small pox visitation. while
others give out as professional and
box that glitters, but that it is ele-
plants itch that stalketh abroad like
the pestilence at noon-day.
Both weather prophet factions recog-
nize the ground hog as a sooth saver
and a prophet, and both have an abid-
ing faith in the moon, and both recog-
nize the true toad as storm prophet
surrounded with a halo of time honored
weather wisdom.
But as to the day when the ground
hog goeth abroad to take an observa-
ton, there enters the wedge of dissen-
sion. Both sides reverently believe that
the same moon whose changes cause
floods In North Carolina and famine in
bleeding Kansas, fortells the weather
with the accuracy of an astronomer
predicting an eclipse.
One faction relies on the first dog
day settling the amount of rain likely
to fall, while another fixes the state of
the weather the day the Virgin starts
on her journey as the rule by which to
settle the next forty days. AS dill
gent seeker after truth, I have tried to
learn who the virgin is, where she is
goin. and why it is necessary for her to
annually take this Wandering Jew-like
pilgrimage I am told that it is none
of my business, that any man who
questions the voyage of the virgin is a
heather who is considerably lower than
the angels.
/ have farmed this year, but have
set at naught the traditions of the
elders. / planted corn in the new of
the moon, plowed deep and plowed
close and often. Men who cherished
an idolatrous reverence for signs, hoary
With age and tradition, have passed me
with their bull teams and tar-axle wa
CONS. and admonished me that | was
"a ruinin' of my crop They We're
hunting corn, having been out since
the ides of blustery March, but were
loaded to the muzzle with gratuitous
corn boom serenely on, but I have lost
my prestige in church and State.
No man is fit to hear Sunday school
class who revleth the wisdom of the
fathers or sets at naught the yotaries
/ of the Queen of Night.
A man who will go down into the red
clay with a two-horse pillow, and that
against the garnered wisdom of all
the 'Suuires, Colonies, Captains, horse
doctors and Majors. is exerting a per-
nicious influence over the rising genera
ton and deserves to be mpzzled.
CORN CRACKER.