_ OBSERVATIONS OF A RETIRED VETERAN V
The people are taking their vacation--an imposing three-syllable name for a very tiny slice of holiday taken off an immense lump of work. Of all the impositions that I know, this vacation business, in the way we take it, is greatest. Somehow, by some inexplicable way, it has grown into a custom with men who have business, to understand that a vacation means two weeks, fourteen days, out of three hundred and sixty-five, or one week out of every twenty-six. And then back again to work. It is like taking a poor devil out of a box once a year, and after giving him a breath of fresh air, putting him back and letting the lid down on him again. It is often said that a thing is as free as air, but to a busy man the air is anything but free. Whiskey, cigars, newspapers, the church, the theatre are at hand and easy of access, but the long, lazy, untrammelled breathing of fresh air out of town is hard to get. I never see a cart-horse enjoying his dinner out of a nose-bag that I don't think this is the way business men get their fresh air. They sniff it from the streets on the run. They haven't time to unharness and drop the cart and take a long and satisfactory meal. I say I don't know who invented the two weeks system, but I strongly suspect the doctors had a hand in it. I never hear their flippant, devil-may-care (you must see by this time that I am in an awful humor) way in which they assure you that a week or two out will "set you up all right," that I don't feel that I am getting nearer and nearer to the inventor. But what will I do with him if I get him? It will be the old story, "You didn't improve at the pink sulphur springs; why, what did you do?" Well, I lay down under the trees and had a good rest. "That's it, my boy; didn't I tell you exercise was the thing; why, that's what you went there for." And then he is astonished that Smith didn't improve at the brown sulphur; "what could he have done?" Well, he went fishing and hunted some. "Great Scott, man, how did you expect to improve; why, you walked off every pound you gained. Why, you went there for rest, not to walk yourself to death." And so they go. As if fourteen days could hold enough of health in them to improve anybody. Fourteen days is of no account to anybody unless, perhaps, it might be a two-weeks respite to a man to be hung, and even that would be a very temporary sort of satisfaction.
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Now, that I am in a bad humor, let me touch on another grievance. I declare to you that something ought to be done about tomato cans--a law forbidding women to have or handle them. There now; don't fly off and say I am attacking the gentler sex. I am not; I am attacking the combination of the two. Take the gentler sex by themselves and they are just lovely, but when they go in partnership with tomato cans they are--well, I won't say anything rash. There is one thing, thank heaven; I can keep my temper under all circumstances. Sitting in the cars the other day, engaged wasting a whole day of my fourteen to go something over a hundred miles, the new Floral Transfer Express came in sight. It was a lady of middle age--I won't say how old, though I wouldn't have forgiven her if she had been sixteen. Her arms were full of tomato cans, containing slips of flowers, and it took the conductor and porter both to hoist her up the car steps--for like all women, she would rather be run over than let go her bundles. When she took her seat, the cans were distributed on all the seats around her, two-thirds of them exuding the water with which the flowers had been sprinkled while she was waiting at the station. I got two or three of them as a retribution, I presume, for my having kept her from falling over the stove, and for my duplicity in saying that they would not be in the way in the slightest. If I live I shall hereafter be a more truthful man. I was kept busy just four hours balancing them so as to keep them from being jarred from the seat by the motion of the car. But one ray illuminated the scene, and that was, when returning from the water cooler she sat down on a little nest of four of them. It looked like a judgment and I believe it was. I don't mind the deadly traps women set on window ledges, in the shape of tomato cans filled with flowers to slip down on man's head, but I do insist that railroad authorities should not allow them to bring canned flower gardens into the cars with them, and in that I have the support of every free born American citizen.
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While I was away I learned a secret that is worth a good deal of money to any young man intending marriage, and that would have been without price to me if I had known it thirty years ago--before I knew the estimable woman, who, in company, insists that I am her better-half, and in private treats me as if I were hardly a sixteenth. I learned it at sea. Just before we sailed out of a port one afternoon a couple came down to the wharf, which consisted of a very large and fine-looking young woman and very small young man, who carried himself with much meekness. Why will little men marry big women? They looked like they had not been long married. When they came on board she was the captain and he ranked about cook. When they got off, forty-eight hours after, he ranked as admiral and she ranked about a hand before the mast. When they got on board, she called him William, and he called her "Maria dear." When they got off she called him "Willie dear," and he called her plain "Maria." When they came to supper she was the man of the two--two hours after, she was laid out on the deck benches, vowing every minute that she would die. From that moment he commenced advancing in rank. He was not subject to seasickness, and walked the plunging deck like a bantam rooster. In a firm voice he ordered her to her state-room, where she remained till the evening of the next day. She came out a changed woman. She evidently viewed "Willie dear" as a superior being, whom the sea itself couldn't conquer, and whose attentions to her in her sickness--which I am bound to add were kind and unremitting--were such as such beings bestow in charity on mortals made of humbler stuff. She came out of her stateroom the next evening as limp as a rag, and clinging to the little bantam as if letting go would be sure death. Seasickness had completely changed the manner and carriage of the two people. I could not help wondering if the bantam saw his advantage as I saw it, and whether, now that he had her down, he would keep her down? It struck me, while looking at them, that every man, sure of his sea legs, should early in his married life, take his wife to sea. It may give him a lifetime of peaceful rest.
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Still speaking of the sea; for I am too far from shore now to turn back, we had one day of it in which was painfully illustrated the line, "Water, water everywhere, and not a drop to drink." The steward, having been changed from his own ship to ours without notice, had not laid in his wines and liquors for the voyage. It was awful news when it was announced after getting out to sea, and paled many a cheek. Much to our surprise, however, all the next morning one of the passengers appeared in a state of exhilaration not to be accounted for by anything we had seen on the table. Later, he appeared still worse, and as he did not appear at dinner, we concluded that he was drinking to excess in his room. A passenger said indignantly that "the man was killing himself," and volunteered to go in and see about him. About dark, that day, the volunteer made his appearance on deck. After some uncertain steps he managed to seat himself on a coil of rope. Looking at us with a look of solemn philanthropy in his face, he announced thickly, that "I got t'way from'm at last." It was very clear that he had.
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Do you know that I never travel the sea that I am not pervaded by an antagonistic and contradictory frame of mind that sets itself against all the popular and religious ideas of it. The ocean impresses me with neither the majesty nor the power of God. Indeed, it does not impress me with God at all, but to the contrary, gives me a sort of undefined, painful unbelief. To me, somehow, there is no other side of the ocean. And looking out on its boundless space, covered with the blue vault lighted by millions of worlds and floating over, to me, bottomless waters, I feel so lost in space, such an infinitesimal atom, that the doctrine of the sparrow that falls seems a chimera, and a God inconceivable. I wonder if this is not so with others. I wonder if all of us do not shrink from this immensity and take refuge in our own hearts where alone we can hear the voice of God, and where, at any hour or in any scene, we can find an instant answer to all our doubts. There is but one spot on the ocean that leads me to a sort of a fanciful realization of a future life. It is that red one made by the setting sun, especially if we be off shore, and the birds are flying landward. The roseate bridge thrown across the water, swinging with the waves, the intense and silver bright-ness of the centre of the arc framed in the evening clouds that roll around it, and the gleaming wings of the birds, as they flash across the disc and disappear in the shining centre on their way homeward, somehow bring to my mind the gates ajar and the souls flying from earth to their final rest. There may be beautiful pictures to come after this life; if there are, sunset at sea is as near as our mortal minds can yet come to them. _