F CULTUS JOHNNY 17

OF THE BOOBY MAN 24

OF HARD TIMES HANCE 35

OF THE TOO SURE MAN 55

OF THE UNLOVED MAN 60

OF THE CHIEF WHO WAS BIGGER THAN HE LOOKED 66

OF SIMPLE SIMON UP TO DATE 72

OF THE HIGH CLASS ESKIMO 79

OF THE SWEET YOUNG THINGS 89

OF THE TWO LADIES IN CONTRAST 97

OF THE RUSE THAT FAILED 100

OF THE REAL SANTA CLAUS 107

OF THE RETREAT FROM MOSCOW 113

OF SICAMOUS 118

OF THE UBIQUITOUS CAT 122

BITS OF HISTORY:

OF THE FOOLHARDY EXPEDITION 127

OF THE LAWS OF LYCURGUS 133

OF JOAN OF ARC 138

OF VOICES LONG DEAD 144

OF THE WHITE WOMAN WHO BECAME AN INDIAN SQUAW 151

THROUGH THE MICROSCOPE 157

Of the Rolling Stone

Once upon a time in a small village in Bruce County, Province of
Ontario, Dominion of Canada, there lived a man who was destined to
establish a precedent. He was to prove to the world that a rolling stone
is capable at times of gathering as much moss as a stationary one, and
how it is possible for the rock with St. Vitus dance to become more
coated than the one that is confined to perpetual isolation. Like most
iconoclasts he was of humble birth, and had no foundation upon which to
rest the cornerstone of his castle, which was becoming too heavy for his
brain to support much longer.

His strong suit was his itinerate susceptibility; but his main anchorage
was his better five-fifths. One of his most monotonous arguments was to
the effect that the strenuousness of life could only be equalled by the
monotony of it, and that it was a pity we had to do so much in this
world to get so little out of it.

"Why should a man be anchored to one spot of the geographical
distribution like a barnacle to a ship during the whole of his mortal
belligerency?" he one day asked his wife. "We hear nothing, see nothing,
become nothing, and our system becomes fossilized, antediluvian. Why not
see everything, know everything? Life is