﻿Over 30 million bushels of wheat more than last year were threshed by the ‘hands’ this year.
A bunch of seeds, eh? And—yet it was a bad year for the harvest hand.
Why?
Work was plentiful; men were strong; nights were short; days long-winded. They tell me, too, that wages too were paid; two dollars, and better, too,—around Hope, N. D.—and a dollar and seventy-five cents, too, and less, too.
H’m!
Why then was it a bad year for the chivalrous harvest hand? Was it because he wasn’t organized?
Over 50 million bushels more wheat was threshed this year than the average for the past five years—looks as if the harvesters are going hungry this winter. Fact is he may grow so thin that he won’t have strength enough left to organize next year—or sense enough—to say nothing about pitching prosperous bundles of macaroni and headstrong bouquets of bluestem. Forty bushel rye too may stay on the ground unless some of his rich relatives kick the bucket.

New Borg City,— (a bad cold)—. Once we admit that South Street has less than nothing, and First street has one dollar, then we’ve got to admit the Fourteenth street tribe has fourteen dollars, and the Twenty-third street clique has twenty-three bucks, and so on. For, verily, when I have forty-two bucks I go to Forty-Second street and mingle with the other apes disguised as the Park Avenue theatre crowd that infests that sacred precinct;— needless to say I haven’t yet been there.
Reasoning along those lines the Finns on One Hundred and Twenty Fifth street must be holding one hundred and twenty five dollars out of circulation. This cannot be—for is not the Fourteenth street tribe already hissing thru its bridgework that it has more than fourteen dollars, and the dukes and barons of First street grow boisterous to the effect that they have more than a dollar left of the few tips they collected on Eighty Sixth street? Besides, our geography is all wrong: South street rubs elbows and scrapes acquaintanceship with Wall Street. Nobody ever said Wallet street has no jack!
Let us create new and better distinctions, streets, alleys and places denote much nothing. Didn’t a $200 man use the subway for a lodging house? All right.

Looking over my bible, as usual, I came across that passage where the Master fed 5,000 Jews with 5 mackerel and 2 yeast cakes, and I got to wondering what satirical press agents His Father’s Son had? You see, they’d never talk straight from the shoulder—it was always a parable, parabola or paradox. Peace to their ashes!
In those days the citizens were quick witted, like the present day assistant district attorneys of our thick headed prosecutors-in-chief: too thick to keep track of their paydays—the assistant has to do even that for them. Wellsir, in those days, here-in-be-fore refened to, the writers could be as subtle as they pleased, the citizens would get the point.
Not so today. Were I to turn loose all my capabilities, which are myriad, ye editor would hack me up with a pair of dull shears and shove me into the waste basket, after dismembering my personality to his wicked heart’s content—mebbe. If he didn’t, the assistant district attorney would read my pearls of wisdom and try to explain them to a jury—wood thru and thru—and fail. But the jury, being able to talk if not understand, would say: “He looks guilty”—so much different are my looks from those of the scoundrels they are in the habit of associating with on an equal basis—ahem.
But I’m not turning loose my capabilities; rather, I’m gonna talk straight:
Thousands of people never did understand how five thousand Hebrews could get their belly full of five sardines and a coupla Uneeda biscuits. That’s easy! Remember the old sugar buns we used to have? A dozen of them would fill a sack that would drag the brick sidewalks. Why, people got round shouldered just from struggling with those dozens, and at times ruptured themselves when ever the baker, liberal—after a birthday party—bearded the gods by throwing in thirteen.
What do you get today? If I was to say that you can take the same amount of dough (not $$$’s) that formerly made one biscuit , and make four today you would say that I’m an unreasonable radical and a reasonable liar, so you would. So much has things changed since Christ ran a restaurant!
Does the sack drag the pavement today? No. The buscuits ingenuously formed to pass muster under your weary eye, are dropped four abreast into a fragile bag—after which you unconcernedly pay two bits (not ten cents) and bashfully tuck the bag in your vest pocket.
I guess that’s feeding 5,000 suckers with one worm—for which heaven be perished.
—T-b S.