Five Mile Beach weekly journal., 1923-02-09
And Yet
a Fool
-HE exchanges that come to
WILLIAM ALLEN WHITE
IIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIHIIIIIIHIIIIlIIIIIIIlIIlIlI
Copyright, 1922, by the Macmillan Co.


Copyright, 1922, by the Macmillan Co.
"HE exchanges that come to n
country newspaper like ours be-
Il come familiar friends as the
years pass. One who reads these pa
pers regularly comes to know them
even in their wrappers, though to an
Impractical eye the wrappers seem
much alike. But when he has been
poking his thumb through the paper
husks in a certain pile every morning
for score of years, he knows by some
sort of prescience when a new paper
appears; and, when the pile looks odd
to him. he goes hunting for the stran-
ger and is not happy until he has
found it.
One morning this spring the stranger
stuck it's head from the bottom of the
exchange pile, and when we glanced at
the handwriting of the address and at
the one-cent stamp on the cover we
knew it had been mailed to us by some
one besides the publisher. For the
newspaper "hand" is as definite a form
of writing as the legal hand or the
doctors. The paper proved to be an
Arizona newspaper full of saloon adj
vertising, restaurant cards, church and
school meeting notices, local items
about the sawmill and the w0man's
club, land notices and paid items from
wool dealers. On the local page in the
midst of circle of red ink was the
announcement of the death of Horace
P. Sampson. Every month we get no
tees like this, of the deaths OF old
settlers who have gone to the ends OF
the earth, but this notice was peculiar
in that it said:
"One year ago our lamented towns
man deposited with the firm of Cross
& Kurtz, the popular undertakers and
dealers in Indian goods and general
merchandise, 500 to cover his funeral
expenses, and another hundred to pro-
vide that a huge boulder be rolled over
MS grave on which he desired the fol-
lowing unusual inscription: Horace
p Sampson, Born Dec. 6, 1910, and
died -. And is not this a rare
fellow, my lord? He's good at any
thing and yet a fool :" 7
We handed the paper to Alphabet
cal Morrison, who happened to be in
the Office at the time, paving through
the discarded exchanges in the waste
basket, looking for his New York Sun,
and, after Colonel Morrison had read
the item, he began drumming with his
fingemails on the chair seat between
his knees. His eyes were full OF
dreams and no one disturbed him as
he looked off into space. Finally he
sighed:
"And vet a fool-a motley fool
Poor old Samp-kept it up to the end
take it from the guarded way the pa
per refers to his faults, as who of us
have not that he died of the tremens
or something like that" The colonel
paused and smiled just perceptibly
and went on: "Yet l see that he was
a good fellow to the end. / notice that
the Shriners and the Elks and the
Eagles and the Hoo-hoos buried him
Nary an insurance order in his! Pool
old Samp; he certainly went all the
gaits!
We suggested that Colonel Morrison
write something about the deceased
for the paper, but though the colone
admitted that he knew Sampson "lillC
book" there was no persuading Nor
rison to write the obituary.
after some urging and by way OF
compromise" he said, I'm perfectly
willing to give you fellows the facts
and let you fix up what you please"
Because the reporters were botf
busy we called the stenographer, and
had the colonePs story taken down as
he told ito be rewritten into an
obituary later. And it is what he SAID
and not what we printed about Samp
son that is worth putting down here
The colonel took the big leather chair
locked his hands behind his head, and
began:
LET me see. Samp was born, as
he says, December 6, 1910, in Wiscon
sin, and came out to Kansas right af
ter the war closed. He was going tC
college up there, and at the second cal
for troops he led the whole senior class
into forming a company, and enlisted
before graduation and fought from
that time on till the close of the war
He was a captain, think, but you
never heard him called that. When hf
came here he'd been admitted to the
bar and was good lawyer-a mighty
good lawyer for that time-and had
more business n a bird pup with g
gum-shoe. He was just a boy then
and, like all boys, he enjoyed good
time. He drank more or less in the
army-they all did g far as that goes
but he kept it up in a desultory way
after he came here, as sort of ac
cessory to his main business of life
which was being a good fellow.
"And he was a good fellow-an aw
full good fellow. We were all ysuns
then; there wasn't an old man on the
town site as l remember it. We uset