davidaulloa/AmericanStories huggingface dataset:
The Birmingham age-herald., 1911-07-09
HEART TO HEART TALKS-By Ed,uin A. Nye

1 by a daughter of the Puritans in an at mosphere of 1S61-5 Money buy such a song? | No more than it will buy Greek statue or a lyric of Sappho. Do you fancy a. prize could have wrung from Robert de Lisle the tremendous. doom driven liberty loving lines of the "Marseilaise? Why, the drumbeat of 17S9 will sound through 1t foreverl
 Is 1t any wonder when an unfortu- nate man, condemned to the guillotine. was able to prove that he had added verse 10 the great marching song he was to let go?
 No.
 great national song Is the recorded heartbeat of a people in a great crisis. It may be an echo of cashing arms, of death and destruction. but there breathes through 1t prophecy of coming a better day.
 Some time, when the era of universal peace shall come, we shall have a great national song of peace, a song which shall realize the poets dream of furled battlefiags and silent war drums.
 young man threw himself into the Chicago river When a policeman pull, ed him out he said he was driven to the step. In his own words:
 "1 could not see my way through life"
 Poor fool He had s2O in his pocket was strong and healthy, and there was nc one dependent upon him.
 Coward, Suppose all who cannot see the way through life should jump into the water. What would become of the census? It is not given to mortals to see the end from the beginning. Who has a map of the life expeditions in which he is engaged? One may have plans, but plans fall down And often the way grows misty. Sometimes the stars do not shine.
 The forces that are for us are stronger than the forces that are against us! Therefore The wise man goes on.
 He does not go on blndly He goes by faith rather than by sight Faith" sees the glimmer of star and hears holds the way-unseeing.
 Only towards turn back. Because of lack of faith and courage, because of the morbid broodngs lest they fail in the darkness, men and wo- men commit rash acts of self destruc- tion Is moral courage decreasing?
 Life is given to be hazarded. I say it is a gift And if it Is gift no one has the moral right to throw it away. Hug your gift closely.
 If defeats come, let them Even de- feats, if honorable, are form of glorious victory.
 Let us die nobly straining toward the goal. And if sometimes the harness should gall the tender spots-well, the scars are honorable.
 Life is to be lived-to the brim. Bravely drink the cup.
 Lift high the beaker and let us drink
The Birmingham age-herald., 1911-07-09

bust a cannun cracker under the coat. tails of a persunal enemy, or ride 14 hours on a train full of purspiring feller citizens to sum town we don't care hoot for and get there in time to start back Forever will we manufacture cheap toy guns, and pistols and put them in the hands of our children in order that they may be as patryotic as ourselves fthey get ovver 1t. So long as we air for and get there in time to start back. our taxes, just so long will we celebrate the 4th of July in whatever mannur ir suits us. It was creeated just for this rNrticitlar purpose It is the safety valve of the Republic. w ehave the 4th of |. " nl our system evvery yaer and if we git 1t out with loud splash, and then we air perfectly safe and sane again, till next Christmas.
 On the 4th of July all peepul get closer togethur; the banker and the laborer; the lawyer and the honest son of toll, the prohibsionest and the blind tiger; the milionair and the pauper; the minister and the shark; all rub elbows and go out to hear sum local Patrick Henery climb up into the clouds of ;rew southern elerquence, and unfurl the banner Of freedum ovver this Our country tis of thee and cheer him wildly when he de- mands that we phase the polytical des- tiny of our land again into she hands of himself and the Grand old Democratic Party, and he will evver be trew to his trust. He ussually neglects to say which Trust, but, that is all rite, we air sat- isfied and we do so, and aftur we ar worn out with our strenuous day, we go home to Muther, sum times witht. finger missing. or an eye put out, or leg broken. or a slat jabbed in. but full of patriotic and idottic fervur and beer Do not my countrymen try to suppress it. It is foolish, for it can't be did.
 Yours trooly,
 Bill Vines.
The Birmingham age-herald., 1911-07-09

their pictures And all who have studied their faces know that the marks and lines of the right side of their faces are remarkably unlike those of the left. I have made the experiment with the faces of Frances Bacon, David Hume, his grace the present Lord Bishop of London, and many others, and 1 find that they come under the rules as do all the pictures of Edwin Booth, Dion Boucicault and others upon whom l have experimented. To make fair experimentation one must see to it that the pictures are accurate and as free from shadows as possible
 To enter somewhat into particulars, I remark, that the eyes are not precisely alike on the same face. They are not Of the same size always and are sometimes set in the face at different angles Nor are they always of the same color. Us- ually they are, but sometimes they are not I know lady who has one eye of soft beautiful brown, the other eye Is an indigo blue. I said that the eyes are not always of the same size. I know a man with one big brown eye; the other ts small and disfigured by squint, the vision being oblique.
 Now, we all know how expressive of emotion are human eyes, and we know what the poets have said in their praise: Bryant spoke of
 Eyes that shame the volets."
 Tennyson, In Memoriam, says:
 Her eyes are homes of silent prayer"
 Said Longfellow:
 'The deep eyes, amid the gloom, Shine like jewels in a shroud.'
 Shakespeare makes Romeo say of Ju-
The Birmingham age-herald., 1911-07-09

Will money buy anything really worth while? real song is a message from the heart to the heart. It may limp in it's lines. and the tune may be raggedly inept, but if 1t is real message it must have been born out of deep emotions stirred to the depths by some great crisis.
 That Is how "The Star Spangled Ban ner" came to be:
 Francis Scott Key was a prisoner aboard a British ship, and real bombs were bursting in air Would he see by "the dawns early light what so proudly we hailed at twilight's last gleaming?"
 "The Battle Hymn of the Republic was written under a like pressure.
 The stirringly beautiful but terrible hymn, with it's martial swing and spirit was born in the soul of Julia Ward Howe as she heard the tramp of the troops on Virginia soil. Its stately and heroic sentences could have been written only
The Birmingham age-herald., 1911-07-09

The boy drawled: MT. Pinksron, fa- ther sent me over here to git your juds- ment of this ere dog" Lige stopped in the middle of his oration to ask: What does your daddy think of that ere dog2' The boy answered: He low he's a right down clever dorg.s Of course that was a mortal affront to Lige, that anybody should pass sentence on a dog without first getting his Judgment"
 Lige turned to the boy and said And so your dad thinks him a good dorg? Hist him up, my son, hist him up" The boy straddled the cur, locked his fingers under the brsket, and "h'isted" him Then Lige made a speech in which he discov- cred more bad qualities in that dog than all the tongues of Babel could utter. cannot undertake to repeat it; but the close of Mr Pinkstons oration. as re- peated by Knott, was like this; And look here, men, whenever you see the dew claws hang on a dorg as low as they do on that ere dorg you can bet your bottom dollar he'll set on his launches till he wears out thousand tails barkin' up a tree there's nothin' in."
 One of the greatest of democrats, one of the most admirable of men, left our scenes when Proctor Knott died.
The Birmingham age-herald., 1911-07-09

ity, arrogance and a hard nature. It Is dHicult to live with the owner of the sheer.
 Unfortunately we have no profile pie ture of this subject. It may be that some conclusions would be modified if we had,
 Now while only few men are techni- cally believers in physiognomy, nearly all men practice it. We classify men accord ing to their faces. We say of men, we do not like them because their faces are not good ones. Or we do like them be- cause their faces declare them as they are" The principles of ethics sometimes are so confusedly set forth in the face that we say, "I do not know why, but l don't like that man." It is Wentworth s case over again: 'I do not like thee, Dr. Fell" etc. We say, that man has a bad eye, "a mean nose" "a chin that means weakness of mind" thin lips that portray a money lover and miserly in- stincts.
 What we say practically others have said theoretically for two thousand years indeed, from the days of Pythagorus unti now. In the Greek and Latin classics and in subsequent literature, we find many references to physiognomy. Tn the 16th century there were many publications contributed to this subject. In the times of Elizabeth, Queen Anne and the Georges, laws were enacted prohibiting anyone's engaging in the practice of physiognomy.
 The philosophy of physiognomy is thus stated by Alexander Macalister, M. D., F. R. &, "The actions We look upon as expressive of emotions are such as were at sometime serviceable in relieving or gratifying the desires or sensation ac- companying the emotion. Such actions become habitually associated with the mental condition, and continue even after their utility is lost. Certain muscles which produce these actions become
The Birmingham age-herald., 1911-07-09

from habitual action strengthened, and when the skin becomes diminished in fuli- ness and elasticity with advancing age ths action of the muscles produce furrows or wrinkles in the skin at right angles to the course of the flores of the muscles As the mental disposition and proneness to action are inherited by children from their parents, so the facility to action and the proneness to expression are sim ilarly developed under the law of hered- ty. To some extent habitual muscular action and the habitua flow of nerve i. force in certain directions, may alter the contour of such bones and cartridges as are thereby acted upon by the muscles of expression"
 Gypsies and other fortune telers. as a rule. are only successful in their art, be- cause they are good readers of the face-1 They are governed by the law of rrooa-A bility, generally Such and such thhss | will happen to you, because theyNsusuaa1y,
 happen to people of like temperanfssnts- An old physiognomist in Greece, Zopyrus
 by name, characterized Socrates as dull,
 stupid and sensual. When the bystanders
 had their laugh at Zopyrus. Socrates said. these were undoubtedly his natural char
 acterstics from which he had been turned 1 by philosophy.
 The woman's face that l have referred
 to, is that of vastly capable mentality.
 In way she is pretty. To certain na- lures she would be strangely fascinating. and men of strong occult powers can, easily dominate her. Morally she ik s degenerate. She is strangely religious: but her religion lacks the element of mortality entirely. So, we read of her:
 "The girl has faced the shame of pub- lie confusion and by her murmured fie-l tails has failed to deny unprintable ques- tions-al for the sake of man twice her years, to whom her soul was given by her mother for safe-keeping.
The Birmingham age-herald., 1911-07-09

ton, who approaches him in copiousness of vocabulary. What difference there was in the speech of Carlisle and that of Knott! One was arctic, the other tropic. It would be impossible to expurgate one of Carlisle's speeches; it would be cruel to emaculate one of Knott's. Knott was the tulip, splendid and gorgeous Carlisle was the violet, single and odorIess. Knott's English is beauty; Carlses is strength.
 The last speech I heard Knott make was his guest, so to speak. He asked my dear old friend, Jim Hopper, about the ablest man I ever saw, and me to hear the argument It was as profound a dis cussion of the subject of taxation as l ever heard and wish it had been printed as 1t fell from his lips. I was absolutely entranced by the genius and the eio- quence of the man. If every community great and small, in our republic would follow the philosophies of this wonderful man, who might have been companion with Plato. we would not only reap the fullness of Goshen, but we would have the delights of Utopia.
 He made that speech fin the same room where I had heard him the first time I ever saw him. We walked across the
The Birmingham age-herald., 1911-07-09

reverence at the foot of the statue of George Washington!
 In Lincoln park, Chicago, not long ago. II heard one of these irreverent sprigs speak of the great st/Sue of Abraham Lincoln as 'the old party on the ped estal.''
 Peter Grayson was right.
 We are to have a new national an them.
 prize of half million dollars. "con- tributed" will be paid for a national song that shall "officially" take the place of 'The Star Spangled Banner"
 So?
 It fs true 'The Star Spangled Banner goes up above F and down below middle c and no one but a prima donna can successfully render 1t without risk of cracking the voice.
 But
 Will money buy the song?
The Birmingham age-herald., 1911-07-09

Sneed saw an lad" A young man was wanted in the agri- cultural implement business who would begin at the bottom and make good. Sneed applied and after several inter- views was offered the place at sS week to begin.
 Could he do it? Was it wise to give up sure thing for an experiment Could the little fam fly live on sS until the first increase In diary? The wife said yes. There's lot of heroism in the world besides the | bravo" sort
 Sneed accepted and the family moved
 into a ten dollar house in the rear of the old number Telephone and electric lights were cut out. Cheap cuts of meat and old clothes helped some.
 Tn sixty days came $2 increase, an other at six months, at nine months, at the end of the year.
 Inside the second year Sneed was draw ing $90 per month. Besides
 He had learned business and knew the mechanism of every machine handled by the firm. Now he is assistant credit man, with but one promotion between him and big salary,
 Fine! Fine!
 Do not disguise the fact that 1t took rare courage to let go a fixed income and take up an untried business. Sneed was in a rut and it jolted things to get out. n..lA St.s,
 But
 Having made his decision, having burned his bridges behind him, having plunged into the Rubicon, he had won half the battle before the fighting.
 And also. be it remembered, besides Sneed there was
 The woman behind the man.
 The character of Peter in F. Hoplxin- son Smiths book Wou should read ib is a fine old gentleman who lifts his hat to the statue of George Washington.
 The author tells it this way:
 Peter wheeled and lifted his hat to the statue. Good morning. your. excel lency,' he said in a voice mellowed by the same respectful tone with which he would have addressed the original in the flesh.'
 A strange conceit? His companion thought so and laughed at it, whereat Peter says: ''He wasn't put there for ornament, my boy, but to be kept in mind, and there is no place in the world where his example is so much needed as in Wall street. Nobody rever- ences anything nowadays. Even our | presidents have to be murdered before we stop abusing them Afterward moralizing, he says: Into our maw go respect for tradition, rever- | ence for the dead. decency, love of re- Iueion. sentiment beauty. They are back numbers.
 DO you wonder. my boy, why touch my hat to his excellency? | Nor was Peter crank. He was tho hard-headed paying teller of Wall streer bank.
 But-he had ideals. The novel hself is q story of the clash between modern bus mess methods and idealsm.
The Birmingham age-herald., 1911-07-09

1 for the protection of our inf1nt industries, and T. Roosevelt. Perish the thought. Yet evvery now and then. sum bonehed rises up frum sum phase of obskurity
 and seys in clarion tones, Give us a
 sane 4th of July" No one hands him
 one, however, or pays enny attension to him. What would the 4th of July be if 1t
 weer sane? It would be like enny uther old day in the week. It would lose It's
 glammer, if we weer not permitted to do a lot of stunts that would be regarded foolish on enny uther occasion. But II
 evvery body is permitted to do as ne pleases it is a striking and butiful Illus
 trasion of our blessed libberty suppose
 a few accidnts will and do happen? This
 Is simply little moor sacrlhce to our
 glor1us sentimint of freedum
 Suppose no cannuns weer hfed; no nre
 works turned lose; no pig rases run, nc orrasions maid: no booze consumed; no excurssions on the railroad; in short, suppose evvery body set around and talked ovver a sweat? Why the 4th would not seem the 4th, and the peepul would becum as gloomy and morose as meet ing of a lot of bank depositors aftur the cashier had gone to Canda. It IS nec- essary that the peepul give expression to
 there pent up feelings, 1t is necessary that
 we rise up and raise Rough House that the lurid geaem may De seen round the world in order to put them on notice that this country still belongs to the peepul. and not to J. P. Morgan-uther- wise they would have no evvidence of it. Forever will this day be selebra ted in this country so long as the stars and stripes wave ovver it, in a mannur cal culated to make the hare of Kings and
 Emperers curl. Forever will we try to climb a greezy pole with S gold peece on top of it with our sunday pants on, or clasp to our manly boosums husky. shoat, besmeered with the product of the fat of one of his own neer relations. or
The Birmingham age-herald., 1911-07-09

But it is not Proctor Knott the states man that I am going to tell you about, but Proctor Knott the man. The second time I saw him was at a circuit court in Adair county. Spencer Dabney was there, and o, the rollicl1ing fun they did makei It was not wit that has a virus to 1t and stings and cauterizes, but 1t was the very unction of humor, that cap lures even the victim of it. There was as much difference between Proctor Knott and Tom Reed as there Is between acid and ointment. Reed irritated; Knott soothed.
 have writ miles and miles of stuff about Proctor Knotts speeches. Nearly everybody knows him by the Duluth speech alone. that even in that vein Is not nearly so good a speech as that on paving Pennsylvania avenue. But Proc tor Knott was a greater thinker than he was poet or a humorist. Above all he was a democrat with big D, doctrin- aire with a bigger D. He was jurist enough for chief justice of the supreme bench of the republic.
 The weakness of Knott was in his very opulence. I know of none in public life at this time, unless it be Martin Little
The Birmingham age-herald., 1911-07-09

"Slawkenbergius Tale" Those who saw the late Richard Mansfield in the char acter of Cyrano du Bergiac will never forget the man with the big nose, Cyrano himself.
 King Duncan, In Macbeth, said:
 There's no art,
 To find the minds construction in the
 face"
 But others there are who think differ entity The physiognomist says: There Is an almost universal correspondence be- tween the facial expression and the in- most soul. Therefore, he reads the face, as an index of the mind, and tells you what the character is. Charles Dar- win was not a technical physiognomist, but the conclusion of physiognomy are generally supported by his great work on ''The Expression of the Emotion in Man and Animals"
 A physiognomist would say something like this as he studies the picture of the woman to whom referred at the opening of this paper.
 The picture represents a person with great breadth of skull formation from ear to ear, similar to the pictures of Na- poleon. She has, therefore, great physi- cal vitality She can endure suffering and hardship, and laugh at pain. No questions asked by lawyers or judges can daunt her. Her high cheek bones, which are like an Indians, indicate caution and reserve. She will think before she speaks, and in her own mind, will select the evidence she gives. If the picture is a good one, the nose indicates a serious defect of character which has Been acquired. It starts right, but is smooth for a short distance only. About two-thirds of the way to the lobes the cartilage under the skin seems roughened. If she were man I should say he Is not to be trusted in
The Birmingham age-herald., 1911-07-09
S the indictment too sweeping?

Is the indictment too sweeping?
 Fancy a money mad broker saluting, even in his mind, that fine statue oppo- site the subtreasury.
 To high financier, absorbed in the game tradition has no glamor, greatness no precedence of honor, goodness no prestige, heroism no appeal. "rhe ten der grace of day that is read,' Valley Forge, Yorktown--these are nothing to him.
 And, without being pessimistic, it may be said that lack of reverence is one of the crying evils of our day.
 What of the callow youth who dubs his father 'the old man and speaks of his mother as "the old lady?" Who calls his fathers advice dope and speaks of his mothers caution as dream stuff?" What of the girl, who in the presence of guests, is greatly distressed over mothers ac- cent or fathers table manners?
 Imagine these youngsters displaying
The Birmingham age-herald., 1911-07-09

NJ it belongs.
 4 Live in the future, not in the past.
 Because you are built that way. You are built to go forward. just as boat Is built to run forward and not backward. If the boat backs it is only that it may go forward again.
 Do not be a crawfish. The crawfish naturally goes backward. It is its normal locomotion. It goes for ward only by effort.
 You are by nature an optimist If you have become a pessimist 1t is because you are abnormal. You are warped. You are sick in body or in mind.
 Men must go forward. Nations must make progress. fr- There's the Hebrew nation--the optim- istic nation The early Hebrews put the golden age in the future, not in the past. Their prophets always looked to a better day ahead when instead of the thorn shall come up the myrtle tree" They were idealists. Therefore the race owes them much. They gave us something to look for ahead
 There's the Japanese.
 Their history is the opposite. For cen tury after century they looked only into the past They worshiped their ancestors
  but the dead Therefore they got mo- where and they contributed nothing to mankind Only as they have turned their faces partly to the future have they done things.
 And you! Live your normal life.
 Let the dead past bury it's dead. Let go of yesterday when it is done. Live for tomorrow. Project your life.
 Push Into the full flower of tomorrow t- to
 Do not mourn for the chance that IS dead. for the mill never grind with tho water that Is past.
 Why do men die Because they have nothing to live for, hope for, strive Tor. Forward marchl
 ''And the Lord said to Moses, Speak unto the children of Israel that they go forward" s fg(
 Let the leeks of Egypt go. The land of milk and honey is you
 supposing you had a wife and baby dependent upon you, would you volun- tarily give up a sure salary of $O and take one at half that figure?
 B. F. Sneed of Chicago did.
 And he did 1t after mature thought and consultation with his wife-and the baby. And Mrs Sneed urged him to do it.
 A foolish woman?
 But stay. Hear the story. Sneed was . sort of human adding machine in an insurance office. Saturday afternoons off. two weeks vacation with pay. But there was no chance of promotion. Men grew gray at the .same desk they took as youngsters.
 Like thousands of office hacks work CTS at billing machines, mtmeographs, iedgers, envelope addressers, invoice checkers--he saw nothing ahead but the oay envelope.