h a
misfortune never happened to me, this problem stared me in the face when
I began carrying those fatal telegrams. I tackled the problem with a
boyish mind. I soon resolved it into these propositions:

When a laborer dies his little children are scattered to the winds.
Brothers and sisters may never see one another again.

When a man with property dies, his children are kept together. Their
future is made safe by the property.

Labor provides for to-day. Property provides for to-morrow.

That truth was driven into my mind when I saw one family after another
scattered by the death of a laborer. A merchant in Sharon died, and his
children, after the funeral, kept right on going to school. There was no
doubting the truth of my rule: Labor makes the present day safe--but the
present day only. Capital safeguards the future.

From that day on, I argued that we should buy a home and save a little
every day for capital. It was our duty thus to protect ourselves, should
our father die, against being scattered among strangers.

CHAPTER X. MELODRAMA BECOMES COMEDY

Every race gets a nickname in America. A Frenchman is a "frog," a negro
a "coon" and a Welshman a "goat." All the schoolboys who were not Welsh
delighted in teasing us by applying the uncomplimentary nickname. This
once resulted at the Sharon operahouse, in turning a dramatic episode
into a howling farce.

I was acting as a super in the sensational drama She, by H. Rider
Haggard. Two Englishmen were penetrating the mysterious jungles of
Africa, and I was their native guide and porter. They had me all blacked
up like a negro minstrel, but this wasn't a funny show, it was a drama
of mystery and terror. While I was guiding the English travelers through
the jungle of the local stage, we penetrated into the land of the
wall-eyed cannibals.

The cannibals captured me and prepared to eat me in full view of the
audience while the Englishmen behind the trees looked on in horror. The
cannibals, who were also supers led by an actor of the "troupe," set
up a hot pot to boil my bones in. I was bound hand and foot, while the
cannibals, armed with spears, danced around me in a heathen ceremony,
chanting a voodoo chant and reciting a rigmarole by which cannibals
are supposed to make their human feast on a sacred rite. As they danced
about me in a circle, they sang:

"Is it an ox? Him-yah, him-yah." And they jabbed their spears into me.
Some of the supers jabbed me p