﻿MIDSUMMER FALLING LEAVES 
By T-BONE SLIM 
 
It’s just too bad those street cars can not afford two-man crews. I see oil trucks now have two men, one in front and one in the rear. Oh, well, oil really is an improvement over a herd of baptists and prespiretarians — if I read the signs correctly. 
Gillette Safety Razor Co. and United Cigar Stores Co. all but kissed when they made-up out of court. “Friendly business relationship between the two had been resumed,” says Staff. Johnson. United” gets $1,900,000 and a cancelled long term contract. Gawd! how that pair love each other? I wish I could love that way. 
Alexandria, Va., police chief is charged with raiding an ice box at the city market and removing provisions therefrom—he was fired. The chief has a wife and seven children who no doubt will now mourn the lost pay check as well as the two sacks and one box of vegetables, fruits and canned goods. 
This is a serious condition, true enough. But it won’t be real bad till Andy Mellon gets caught in a hen-house (clothes or feathers) and I’m betting in that case we’ll get an explanation that is an explanation. 
Farmer John drives through the town in his “Hoover” grain tank with the endgate open, sprinkling the “golden grain” along the streets to feed the pigeons and sparrows. All that grain is just so much tangible poverty to him. Instead of running those sprinkling excursions John should have the manners to let the American people starve in peace as they evidently are determined. 
John goes home and reads The Daily Bull-Spreader: $800,000,000 was spent that year to improve the roads; $917,000,000 went the same way in the year of our Lord umpteen-steen—a cramp catches him in the leg, “My Gawd, he groans, hard roads have made of me, a rugged individualist, a pauper!” 
Isn’t that the truth?—a path to the cabin bankrupts the rancher. 
We don’t need sunspots any more. 
Mpls., Minn., Citizens Alliance has been described to me as “a “clearing-house for dehorns.” How much that applies I am unable to say in the heat of the moment, my investigations being incomplete, but I have one of my best operators working on the ease and full report may be expected any moment now. 
The dehorns line the curbstone around the Alliance edifice in sitting or reclining postures interrupted only by periodic trips to the 5 and 10 for bottles of bay-rum, an excellent tonic for pates bald as the belly of a watermelon. My operator affirms, after duly being sworn at the aged scare crows partly hobble and partly stagger into the bay-rum marts and make their purchases and then not to be outdone by the beautiful and courteous saleslady they thank her kindly for the service, tip their hats to her and (many of them) try to back out bowing and scraping. A bald head is surely a severe trial! 

Three hundred Royal Weaving Co. strikers, Pawtucket, R. I., had a hand-to-hand scuffle with police near the company’s mills—one hurt, three jailed. The fight started when police sought to disperse the strikers. 
Evidently the police have not yet learned to tend to their own knitting. 
They do not know, poor innocent dupes, that cities, including the effete Pawtucket, may cut their police force in half; that the available amount of prosperity doesn’t justify the employment of so many watchmen. 
Pass the soup, please! 
In these days of disarmament agitation, it is only fair to conclude international disarmament can not be carried through with better grace than municipal disarmament — the determining factors are identical; municipal disarmament holds the trumps insofar as it is intimate to the question of empty cupboard. 
Needless to say neither generals nor patrolmen will disarm voluntarily—mebbe not even upon request—half of the cops may be called upon to shake the guns from their clothes. 
Hundred years hence— 
First Wisecracker: “Who wuz dis guy Washington?” 
Second Wisehead: “He wasn’t a guy; it was a bridge between Jokey and the Mainland.” 
Education is travelling a fearful clip. Better make arrangements to attend Work Peoples’ College, Duluth, Minn., next fall or sooner. 
Springfield, Mass., bridge over the Connecticut River is dedicated to every battle we ever fought. Kind of nice to remember those that get killed in the next war. 
—T-b. S. 
P. S.—Leaves falling from trees middle of July—good night!