on, and
he's the United States.

TRYING AGAIN

No boarding house, tavern or inn was in sight; so into a cavern went
Bruce, in sore plight. By enemies hunted, a price on his head, and all
his schemes shunted, he wished he was dead. "In vain my endeavor,
repulsed my demands; I'll try again never--I throw up my hands!" And
so he lay sighing and cussing his fate, and wished he was lying stone
dead in a crate. A spider was spinning its web by the wall; now
losing, now winning, now taking a fall; though often it tumbled, it
breathed not a sob, nor crawfished nor grumbled, but stuck to its job.
Then Bruce opened wider his eyes and exclaimed: "That dodgasted spider
has made me ashamed! I'm but a four-flusher to sit here and whine!
This morning must usher in triumphs of mine!"

He canned all his wailing and cut out the frown, and went forth
a-smiling, and won a large crown!

And legions of fellows with tears in their eyes, who wear out their
bellows with groaning and sighs, who think they are goners, ordained to
the dump, would harvest some honors if they would just hump! The
spiders are teaching, the same as of old; the spiders are preaching a
gospel of gold: "Though baffled and broken, O children of men, let
grief be unspoken--go at it again!"

ICONOCLASM

King Skeptic wears his modern crown, his stern, destructive law
prevails; he's tearing all our idols down, disproving all our fav'rite
tales. Is there a legend you hold dear, some legend of the long ago?
King Skeptic hears it with a sneer, and digs up history to show that
things of that sort never chanced, and never could, and never will.
"We have," he says, "so much advanced, that fairy tales don't fill the
bill. No faked-up tales of knightly acts, no Robin Hood romance for
me; the only things worth while are Facts, Statistics, and the Rule of
Three."

With diagrams he shows full well that old-time tales are things to
scorn; that such a man as William Tell, in liklihood, was never born.
If Gessler lived and had a hat, he didn't hang it on a pole; the rules
of Euclid show us that--so goes King Skeptic's rigmarole. But,
granting that he had a lid, and hung it on a pole awhile, and granting
that the people did bow down to reverence that tile, this does not
prove that William shot an apple through an apple's core, and so the
anecdote is rot--don't let us hear it any more.

One-eyed Horatius never held the bridge beside his comrades bold, while