El Paso herald. (El Paso, Tex.) 1901-1931, 1913-12-18

KIT HE man who lives next door
to me-" said the undertaken,
mas more children than an
orphan asylum, and they are driving
me crazy, They make more noise than
the geological gardens, and their riot
is at its worst Just when I want to
sleep. I went over and asked the man
if he wouldn't administer an anaes-
thetic 10 his offspring, or at least
move into the country, where nobody
would be annoyed, and he informed me
that if I didn't attend to my own bust
ness he'd consider it a privilege as well
as a duty to punch my head"
That's the way with most people"
commented the village patriarch. You
can't expect reasonable conduct on the
Part of neiShbOrs. I don't believe the
perfect neighbOr has yet been intro
duced to society. We always are con-
fronting that narrow, selfish view when
we commune with our neighbOrs. All
my days have been pestered and ag-
gravated by people living next door to
me.
There was a man named Kersmith
who lived in the house just north or
my place all one winer, and the IN
Justice I suffered at his hands caused
me to lose my faith in human nature.
he persisted in using the cheapest
grade of soft coal in his furnace and
stoves The wind blew from the north
for weeks together, and the black,
greasy smoke from his chimneys blew
over onto my premises and covered
everything with SCOT I went to Ker-
smith and asked him in the most gen.
tlemanly way to use hard coal, but he
positively refused to do anything of
the kind. He said that hard coal would
cost ST ton more than the kind he
was using. and ne was poor man and
couldn't afford it.
selfish people always resort to
sophisTry when they can have no hon
est argument to offer. This man Kerr
household Expenditures enough to enable
him to buy hard coal, and thus please
his neighbor, but he laughed the idea
to scorn. Along towards spring the
wind switched around and blew from
the south for two or three weeks, ana
then dug up all the old rags and cast
off OverShOes I could find, and burned
them, and the smoke that blew over
to Kersmith's was so thick you could
have cut it into squares with a hand
saw. I am not a vindictive man, but
I feel it a duty to rebuke such a man
as Kersmith and he must have realized
that the way of the transgresser is
hard when he had inhaled that smoke
for fortnight.
"At the end Of that time he hired a
furniture van and moved away, and
understand he has spread reports to
the effect that I am bad neighbor, a
hard man to get along with When
first ] heard that report I was indig-
nant, and said that the blame all be-
longed to Kersmith. But one day I
got to thinking over the past, and
began to wonder whether I really was
as good a neighbor as I had always
believed myself to be. For many years
I had been having trouble with one
family or another, and I always took
it for granted that the other people
were fiends in human form, and I a
stainless martyr; but the more I
studied the matter over. the more I was
forced to the conclusion that I had no
reason to take the lecture platform as
the perfect neighbor.
when TwittersOn lived next door to
me lost all patience with him because
he put up a target in his back yard
and shot at it by the hour with a rifle
The rattle Of his artillery got on my
nerves, and I voted him the worst
neighbor I ever knew. He vexed me
to such a degree that I wrote letters
to the newspapers calling attention to
his nefarious conduct. and asking what
the police were doing. He had been
gone from the neighborhOod a long
time before I heard why he left At
that period I was trying to learn to