davidaulloa/AmericanStories huggingface dataset:
The Birmingham age-herald., 1912-12-15

gentleman told him he was mighty glaS to meet him.
 q went over to a drug store in the As tor House to get this thing" he sail "and I was insulted. The fool in that place told me sneeringy that they did rot sell cents worth of anything. [ came over here ready to fight and you treated me like a gentleman. l an glad to know you, young man"
 Then the gentleman gave his card to Ferry. The gentleman was MT. sweetser of the great firm Of Sveetser, Pembroke & Co. He was one of the greatest mer chants of New York and millionaire many times over. He felt so good over the treatment he had received in getting that 5 cents worth of flag root that he spent SIS on toilet preparations before he left the establishment. Next morning he was at Hudnut's again. He had pre- scription written by the famous Dr. Se- guln. He presented 1t ohallengingly 10 young Perry.
 Can you fill that93 Le asked
 Yes" Perry replied.
 The drugs called for were very rare, and Mir. Sweetser knew it.
 Most of the drug clerks downtown ar that time took themselves very seriously. They were pompous and self-a ssured. Men like MT. Sweetser found it a pleasure to deal with the kindly. bashful young night clerk at Hudnut's. What is more. they went to Hudnut and told him about it, but Hudnut kept this fact to himself.
 There never was a dru,s clerk downtown who made so many friends as Charles J. Perry, or who had many odd expe- riences, and no man has reason to know more of the value of courtesy. Once he had a man come 10 him in the early morning and put out handful of gold.
 Isn't 1t nice money" the man asked.
 "It is" Perry replied.
 Take it in your hand" said the mar.
 Perry did so. When he expressed his admiration again Perry started to give the gold back.
The Birmingham age-herald., 1912-12-15

Dana and Vim. Laffan, of the Sun, the famous Henry J. Raymond. and all the big lights of the Journalistic world, dis cussed worlds affairs, when they met there late at night or early in the morn ing.
 They were mighty good customers. and so were the others who came to Hudnut's because of the opportunity afforded to chat with or to see the editors.
 Ferry was always active If he was nos serving some one he was putting some thing to rights. He was very orderly ard seemed to have genigs to know what nen wanted. Customers, seeing rim re- arrange goods. would suddenly discover that he was bringing to notice something that they particularly wanted or desired. Then they would purchase and feei grate- ful to him for having brought it to their notice He was just as courteous, Just as kindly, just as objging in the last hour of his l2 hour trick as he was in the first. He did not growl or grumble If he was kept few minutes or a hale hour over his time Persons who came in fret ful went away with smoothed feelings No one could be grumpy in his presencs He was a treasure to Iildnut, but Huo- nut was awfully slow about showing his appreciation.
 One morning at nearly 2 o'cloci, an am gry and impatient man came bustling into the store He wanted cents worth Of flag root, and he asked in a chaleng- ing voice if Perry lad the stuff Perry smilingly assured him that he did. He wrapped up the preparation, handed i. and check to tae man, smiled, and thanked him. The visitor looked at him in amazement.
 Where do you come from?" he asked How did you get lpre?"
 It was a rough inquiry but the young man, in his bashful, quiet way, told the gentleman in few words who he was and where he camc from, and then the
The Birmingham age-herald., 1912-12-15

IN one of those political sermons which
 we call the prophecies of Isaiah the
 phrase occurs, "A new, sharp thresh- ing instrument. having teeth" This ap- parently was not fail with which the wheat was beaten, but sort of spiked roller or moving machine which tore to pieces the straw and ears strewn upon the threshing floor With this vigorous method the Eternal would go over all the hills and valleys of the earth and loosen the moral chaff from the wheat among the nations of men.
 The phrase has teeth of it's own. and catches the imagination, starts the con- viction of a parallel between modern and ancient ethical and political needs. It gives clue to history, carries a whole philosophy of history in it's hand, sug- gests that all the story of mankind upon the earth, in tribes, nations, empires. wars and discoveries and civilization, has been the story of repeated harvests, re- peated threshing floors, repeated justifi- cation of the wheat. the good and the useful as against the clnging husks of now harmful or at least too long en- during past Every babe that is born looks forward. Every generation is made for the service of the generation yet to come But every generation is held in the husk of it's ancestral tradition, its ignor- ance and inexperience, it's inherited wrongs, it's foolish fears and more fool ish opinions. Then amid a thousand sor- rows the 'new sharp threshing instru- ment, having teeth" does its fiercely benefcent work and the grain of prog ress appears.
 Back of all this is that splendid as- sumption of spiritual genius in the old
The Birmingham age-herald., 1912-12-15

Beware of the chocolate soldier with a righteous causei
 Hundreds of thousands of dollars are being spent in the effort to find one-six- teenth of a second that is missing in the calculations of the worlds astronomers.
 A special building fitted with apparatus war erected-because in the hourglass of time one small grain of sand was miss ing!
 The fraction must be found.
 Because the worlds longitude is cal- culated on the suns time as recorded at Greenwich and Paris and Washington, so that every calculation must account for every atom of time.
 If not?
 If not every meridian line on earth would need to be shifted, every boundary line between countries and states changed and every map of the world made over.
 And the movements of the planets would be variant,
 Do you see the tremendous import of an instant of time? Time s now. All there is of time or ever will be Is com prehended in that now. The past is noth- ing: the future is not born and never will te. So far as humans are concerned there Is absolutely nothing save now.
 Therefore
 Let us utilize the only thing We have. We cannot tura back the dial. neither make the sun stand still. We cannot measure the vaiue of the time we have lost nor compute the value of that which has not yet come to us.
 The present is potential.
 He who best improves what he has best appreciates ifi value. Therefore you will find upon the desk of the busy man this motto: "Io il Now''
 He is tor busy for regrets over the last chance and does not put off until to- morrow the only thing he has in hand.
 NOW spells opportunity.
 Today Is the day of salvation. Today you have inc desire to do Today you ilaye the hope of accomplishment. Today you have the time to succeed
 Do it today.
 Sufficient unto the day is the eviI--and the good-.hereof. Yesterday holds noth- irg but memory; tomorrow nothing but promise. Today is the only day.
 Do 1t now!
The Birmingham age-herald., 1912-12-15
Equities of Woodpeckers
le Nov Yorls world.

From the New ork World.
 A woodpecker that frequents a tree In the estate of a gentleman Of Yonkers, and annoys a neighbor. has caused a quarrel that, progressing from private 10 public remonstrance, has been carried first to the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, next to the police. and at last to the city attorney; but all in vain. There appears no one with jur- isdletion to decide whether a man has any rights a woodpeoker is bound to re- spect.
 But the issue of the controversy is in- significant in comparison with the cause of it. To the New Yorker whose ears are necessarily tormented by the hide ous noises of the city, the shrill grinding of steel drills, the hoarse honking of mo- tor ears. the roar of the elevated trains and the bang and rattle of trucks and carts. with a thousand other discordanr sounds a life in Yonkers. where an Ar cadian stiffness prevails in the night through whose calms and quietnesses one can catch such grateful sounds as the whispering of breezes, the murmuring of waters and the chirp of birds, seems Eysian. For the purpose of obtaining 1t they forsake Manhattan. they undergo the transmutation from a citizen to sl commuter. they forget old ways anl learn new ones. But alas for the vanity of human wshes,-when they have reached the Elysium they find the tap ping of a woodpccker in the morning IS more terrible than the tin-can clangor of mikmen and garbagemen or the aound of riveters at work on the sky scrnpers.
 So did the Sybarite in the story of od find the rumpled rose leaf in his bed of roses more distressing than the stones on which he slept in the desert There is no escape-a woodpecker dwells in every Arcadia.
The Birmingham age-herald., 1912-12-15

Hebrew writer, attrbuting even to love it's fierceness, it's fail with teeth, biting, tearing, crushing. agonizing; that the soft and duleet songs of moral indiffer- ence with which the superficial world of men pleases itself is moral imbecility since love rules the world which love created. Hence certain we'll known dis itch paraphrases the Hebrew well enough
 ''The mills of God grind slowly, but grind
 exceeding small;
 And with patience He stands waiting
 with exaetness grinds He all."
 But there is no friction of the fail or mill which men desire, except that they desire to exercise it upon others. The help that they give to the Head Miller is confusing to His patience as often as 1t Is defiant of His spirit.
 Apply this, for instance, to the func- tion of criticism. It is as often lacking in graciousness as it is resented with indig- nation. On the one hand because 1t hurts 1. is mistaken for insult The critic is forced to veil and soften his message. to draw it's teeth, lest people be too much affronted to profit thereby. They want praise, not blame; praise, not the uncov- ering of weakness or fault. And yet criticism cannot help till it cuts. A tooth less dog, a toothless lion-in what are they more contemptible than a sewing machine without a needle to pierce and wound the fabric which uses and minis ters to beauty?
 Real criticism is, in a sense, the high est and most necessary function of each age of man, a necessity which nature endeavors to supply and which man alone endeavors to make nugatory. The critic
The Birmingham age-herald., 1912-12-15

ment incalculably vast. You shall hear left you is the sort only fit to be asso- ciated with St. Vitus dance. For you may, I suppose. become accustomed to hell itself. and come to think 1t fairly comfortable under the circumstancesl Many a man has made a pact with his ideals and buried them till they grew rotten. I won.er. for instance, why we still permit the hauling of uncovered garbage through the streets or the dwell ing of human creatures in the heart of the city on a monstrous dunghill. An, yes, in Birmingham.
 'Is it nothing to you. all ye that pass by?' Must the northern photographer visit us again and show our shame to the world9 Will nothing but the laceration Of imported steel teeth avail to make us carry the dunghill away and give clean earth and air to the sons of men? If our wealthy citizens had homes at, say Thirty-first street and Eighth avenue north would the conditions be the same? But if not, why should we allow Gods poor to be exposed to the degradation?
 on lhe WHoie lHeh' we ihay concluue that love always bears whip, not for the victim, but for the tyrant, the vic- timizer, and that usually the tyrant is the common usage, the commonwealth. Always the process of evolution is the sacrifice of tne one, the innocent, for Sie community. Always the process of relig ion anu intelligence is the saving of the victims by new reforms of the commun- nifty. But there never IS a reform till the Eternal wields His fail and for each new generation fashions a new sharp threshing instrument having teeth.
The Birmingham age-herald., 1912-12-15

need not be all teeth, or he becomes a cynie. Fault-finding is not criticism, but our present lack of masterly criticism There are so few patient enough and in telligent enough for the work, patient enough to prepare, as for instance. Mac aulay prepared, or Matthew Arnold pre- pared by study and mastery So very many come forward to skim the surface Of things. without knowledge or insight. in boats made of their cockle-shelI likes and disikes, platitudes, profa mites, prei- udices. to show us how to sail the oceans pillows. Or, with no comprehension of the tragedy of things, they jaunti1y as- cend Mount Ebal and with thin voice. unheard of the tribes, enunciate their version of the eternal curse.
 This refers not chiefly to matters of the artistic and literary fraternities. The much larger thing is life itself We need chiefly capable criticism of life itself, and the best we can do is to get a dead Ibsen and a live Bernard Shaw How to shed our chaff. our husk of an outgrown past. how to live and carry forward the inheritance of life to the next harvest, is precisely the Sphinx question of the ages But we also need frank and fear less and adequate criticism of our art, our modern literature, our newspapers, our strivings after beauty and truth, or our indifference to all truth, all beauty.
 Nothing is so tragieal as that genera tons of young people should grow up into manhood and womanhood with no skill to distinguish the excellently good from the indifferent or even the contemptible in books in sentiments. in achievement. Provincialism is an almost umitigated evil. Who has not read those stories so true to life of the girl who goes to Paris
The Birmingham age-herald., 1912-12-15

For many years comic opera has had it's merry jest at the expense of the mock hero, who carried chocolates instead oi bullets in his cartridge belt.
 Ha, ha, hal
 To the ragtime of musical comedy the people have laughed ar the carieatured soldiers of the Balkans-the soldiers of Bulgaria and Servia and Montenegro and Greece.
 And now?
 These chocolate soldiers have met the invincible Turk, and the crimson chapter has been one of the reddest in the annals of warfare.
 The laugh is out of the other corner of the mouth.
 These chocolate soldiers have chased the retreating flag of the Ottoman em- pire across the plains of Thrace and where kiosk and minaret have Haunted in defiance have ,igted the cross in the place of the crescent.
 The Gordian knot which the diplomatic palaver of "the powers" could not untle has been cut by the sword of the choco- late soldier.
 Do you remember Mine. thrySantne- mum?'
 Before the Russo-Ja panese war that opera was much exploited and thousa nds laughed at the droll nonsense.
 The Japanese soldier was featured as the toy soldier His diminutive size was exaggerated and his lilliputian swagger made grotesque.
 But
 The toy soldier soon put that opera out of bushes when ne began to fight "tte bear who walks like man.
 There was nothing to laugh at when the toy soldier went up 203 Meter hill into the jaws of death, into the mouth of hell. It was not a comic spectacle when he gave his body for a bridge over the ditches at Port Arthur, and the world did not smile when his small self helped 10 make the windrows of the dead at Afullden.
 Longfellow says:
 War Is q terrible trade. but in the cause that is just. sweet is the smell of powder.
 You cannot tell what is in a small man until he is tested.
 And God is not always on the side of the heaviest battalions.
The Birmingham age-herald., 1912-12-15

on a geological survey. For three years he was devoted to the work of making chemical analyses of soils, varying his inestigatons by an occasional excursion into the cretaceous and tertiary sorma- tions of Mississippi, and in 1871, he pub lished his first paper. "On the Geology of the Mississippi Bottom"
 During the following summer pr. Smith was elected to the chair of geology and mineralogy of the University of Alabama. Two years later, in 1875 he was appointed state geologist of Alabama, and for 10 years his work on the survey was gratui- tously rendered to the state, Tn 1880 he rendered valuable service in connection with the tenth census, furnishing re- ports on Alabama and Florida for the cotton culture volumes of that census.
 While visiting Florida in connection with this mission, pr. smith discovered
The Birmingham age-herald., 1912-12-15

"/here Park Row branches off from A/ Broadway there used to be
 W gold mine. It was on the first floor of the old Herald building. An old Englishman named Hudnut worked it. Beneath the Hudnut gold mine the presses of the Herald rumbled Above the editors and the printers toied and moiled. Hud- nuts gold mine was a drug store. The store was oddly shaped because the Her aid stood on an irregular bit of ground. The building was put up in the day be- fore skyscrapers, the day of heavy con- struction. The floor space of the drug ntore was broken by the great Corinthian colums which supported the upper stories.
 Hudnut knew the business. He handled only the best goods and he charged the highest prices He was a hard taskmas ter. He exacted the most faithful of ser Sice and he did not pay very good wages, but he taught sound business to all of his employees.
 A boy applied to Mir. Hudnut on Thanksgiving day in 1868, for work. He got a job behind the soda water counter at s5 a week The boy was from Rich mond. Va. He was very modest, very bashful and acted as if he considered it a great privilege to work in such an estao- lishment
 The general run of soda water boys in 1S6S were hot much different from those of today Most of them were careless, flip pant and slangy. But this one was diff ferent. He had a smile for every custom CT, a courteous word for every caller. The other soda water boys and the other clerks laughed at him. They were glad to have him around because it meant less toll for them. After a while patrons got in the habit Of waiting for the bashfu1 boy to serve them with soda, and men who wanted prescriptions filled or wished to buy articles in stock often went to him when they found the prescription clerk or the floor men busy or unsatisfactory.
The Birmingham age-herald., 1912-12-15

The boy seemed to take delight in be- ing obliging. He had a smile for ineom- ing patrons, and a smile and a thank you" for the outgoing ones.
 For year he worked behind the soda counter twelve hours a day without an in- crease of pay or a word of commendation from his employer. Other boys shirked, but he never did. The more they loafed the more he tried to do. He had an am- bition. He wanted to be a floor clerk and a pharmacist. The college of pharmacy was in University place in those days. He took the course there, and when he graduated he was made assistant cashier and then floor clerk. There was one job
 in the Hudnnt establishment that wor- ried the proprietor. He never had been able to get anyone to satisfy him as night manager.
 Lower New York was not the lively place at night then that it is now. The bridge was not built Traffic to Brook lyn was by ferry. Boats ran only once an hour. The men who dropped into Hud- nuts not infrequently were the worse for wear. Sometimes there was not a visitor for hours. It was a long and dreary watch. A light fingered visitor had no difficulty at such time in pocketing ex- pensive perfumes or other articles on dis play.
 MT Hudnut was thinking of closing the store at night because of the diff eulty he had in obtaining a proper man. ager. Something impelled him to give the soda boy trial. That is how it came to pass that Charles J. Perry became the night man at Hudnuts.
 From the time the boy from Virginia became night boss at Hudnut's, the drug store became an institution. The busi- ness increased amazingly. The newspaper man found 1t a very pleasant place to visit. The great editors made it their meeting point after the papers were put to press. John Henderson, of the Herald, John c. Reid of the Times, Charles A.
The Birmingham age-herald., 1912-12-15
HEART TO HEART TALKS-By Edwin A. Nye

mostly not merely a liar, but coward as well, This Is the story: Henry Weinbaum of New York was a clothes presser earning SIP a week. On this sum he supported himself, his wife and four small children.
 The wife died.
 weinbaum was confronted with sit uation most heartbreaking. He must care for the four motherles children and at the same time be away from his home and employed at his work. else the chill dren would have nothing to eat. Somehow for several months he man. aged to get along. Then he did about the only thing he could do under the circumstances. He married again.
 Unfortunately, he made a poor choice of a second wife. She complained that the children made too much work and demanded that they be put in public in- stitution.
 To save his little family from such Q fate was Weinbaums purpose in getting his children their new mother. He want ed to keep his little brood together Therefore he refused her request
 She sued him for divorce.
 On just what grounds the divorce was granted is not clear, but the judge gave her decree. AS part of the judgment Weinbaum was ordered to pay the wom- an s4 per week alimony.
 Of course the man could not pay that sum and support his family. The other day he was arrested, his arrears, with costs, amounting to s207Ss
 In default of payment he was sent to Ludlow street Jail
 Now
 Wife No is free from the care of the troublesome children. Weinbaum is in jail with no prospect of release and the children are wards of charity.
 Even the jaier remarked when Vein baum was committed-jailers are not par ticularly free with sympathy-that "there must be something the matter with the law somehow
 And there is something the matter with the law. But what? The law is out of gear. And yet it is difficult to find the cog and adjust it.
The Birmingham age-herald., 1912-12-15

will cease to aspire. No It is not to every hand that the Will of God entrusts the use of the fail. The story of Keats will endure for many years as a warn ing in literature, but in life also it has it's lesson-lest we exchange provincial adulation for provincial contempt Ex- pectancy and the joy of harvest are for us more usual than the function of the threshlng floor Only when we must judge, only when we must criticise, by all means let us have teeth sharp and glittering, in our instruments The soft and sweet scented airs of the spring time and early summer are no more need ful for the earth than the bitter frost of winter. Our geese are not swans per- haps, nevertheless really fine geese are not to be despised. By all means let the truth come to us. and to our children, whether it bite or smite. The Moloch to fat and complacent as lean and angry. But it is a mean fate to be fed on cream and then die of a surfeit.
 l have already referred to the shrink ing of tradition from searching criticism. Here is usage. Here is the thing we are accustomed to. Why should it be at tackled? We have recently read again how W. T. Stead championed the cause oe the young girls in his day. exposed, as he discovered to the horrors of the white slave trade. Stead was sent to prison because the jurists could not bear to see prominent sinners unmasked and a scandal set booming through the world, to mock perhaps the fame of palaces and princes. That imprisonment was the apotheosis of caste, the immortal tri- umph of snobbery. Propriety and usage