THE SCRAP BOOK.
| Vol. I. | JULY, 1906. | No. 5. |
PATRIOTISM.
By SIR WALTER SCOTT.
Who never to himself hath said,
"This is my own, my native land!"
Whose heart hath ne'er within him burn'd
As home his footsteps he hath turned
From wandering on a foreign strand?
If such there breathe, go, mark him well!
For him no minstrel raptures swell;
High though his titles, proud his name,
Boundless his wealth as wish can claim—
Despite those titles, power, and pelf,
The wretch, concentered all in self,
Living, shall forfeit fair renown,
And, doubly dying, shall go down
To the vile dust from whence he sprung
Unwept, unhonor'd, and unsung.
"Lay of the Last Minstrel," Canto VI.
The Latest Viewpoints of Men Worth While
An Old Business Man Testifies to the Progress the World HasMade Since Seventy Years Ago—Lewis Carroll's Advice onMental Nutrition—Rudyard Kipling Defines What LiteratureIs—Richard Mansfield Holds That All Men AreActors—Professor Thomas Advances Reasons forSpelling-Reform—Helen Keller Pictures the Tragedy ofBlindness—With Other Expressions of Opinion From Men ofLight and Leading.
Compiled and edited for The Scrap Book.
INSIDE FACTS ABOUT THE "GOOD OLD TIMES."
Stephen A. Knight, an Aged Cotton Manufacturer,
Tells of Work and Wages
Seventy Years Ago.
The more deeply one looks into the conditions of life in the "good oldtimes" the more likely is he to find reason for exclaiming, "Thank Heaven,I live in the Now!" Life held out comparatively little for the Americanworking man three-quarters of a century ago. Wages were very small,education was exceedingly hard to obtain, and the comforts of life werefew in comparison with the present time.
At the recent meeting of the National Association of Cotton Manufacturers,in Boston, Stephen A. Knight, of Providence, a former president of theassociation, gave his reminiscences of old-time mill work. Mr. Knightbegan as a bobbin boy in a mill at Coventry, Rhode Island, in 1835. Afterthe lapse of seventy years he says:
My work was to put in the roving on a pair of mulescontaining two hundred and fifty-six spindles. It requiredthree hands—a spinner, a fore side piecer, and a backboy—to keep that pair of mules in operation. The spinnerwho worked alongside of me died about two years ago at theage of one hundred and three, an evidence that all do notdie young who sp