WITHOUT COST Do you know you can furnish your home. throughout-without a cent of extra expenseby simply changing your plan of buying your daily home needs? This is how it can be done. If you will order your home needs such as Soaps, Baking Powders, Teas, Coffees, Spices, Flavoring Extracts, Breakfast Foods, Toilet Goods, Pork and Beans, Rice, Corn Flakes, Cocoa, Chocolate, Starch, Soda, Salt, Washing Powder, Cocoanut, Olive Oil, Home Reme dies, Varnishes, Furniture Polish, Shoe and Stove Polish, etc., in fact all your every day home Lace Curtains-in many beautiful designs and patterns. Given with order for our products. See our catalog. needs direct from us on our You Save Half Your Home Expenses No. 618-Beautiful black chase leather rocker, American quartered oak frame-hand carved. Hollow back. Given with a $10 purchase of our products. For instance: With an order for $10 worth of Food Products of your own selection from our list of 250 different articles, you have a $10 Rocker like No. 618 or a $10 pair of Lace Curtains, or any other $10 Article shown in our big 100 page catalog which contains 1200 Articles to Select From You get double value for your money on this saving plan. Your furniture costs you nothing. We guarantee both Products and Premiums to please you. We let you test them 30 days-if not satisfactory, return them at our expense. A postal brings you our big 100-page Premium Book, free postpaid. It explains all. CROFTS & REED CO. Dept. A-479, CHICAGO Carpets--Curtains-Rugs Linoleums, etc., in many styles, colors and sizes. Giyen with orders for our products. No. 403-Latest improved child's iron crib, white enamel finish, brass trimmings. Given with $10 worth of our products. Couches-Elegant quarter sawed The RAILWAY VOL XXVI. CEDAR RAPIDS, IOWA, JANUARY, 1909. And He Wrote "Finis." BY AL FAIRBROTHER, EDITOR OF "EVERYTHING," GREENSBORO, N. C. No. I. We print the following lines for several reasons-firstly, because Mr. Fairbrother has sent his publication to us as an exchange since its first issue. Secondly, in this dollar-chasing world he is a philosopher who follows his own advice-a rare instance. Thirdly, to show our appreciation of what we have learned from reading Everything-from the straightforward, clear-cut way in which the author writes on all the different phases of human life-of sin and vice, of virtue and morality, of right and wrong, of things worth while, and of the vanities of the world. And to show Mr. Fairbrother that our best wishes go with him and our hope that he will again devote his genius to the upbuilding of the fair Southland-in fine, we hope he will realize shortly, if he does not now, that he is simply forty-eight years young and that he should not think of pulling off his shoes for twenty-five or thirty years yet-principally because they would not fit anybody else. “May you live long and prosper."-ED. Somehow or other we regret to write the word, but with this issue, Everything suspends for a few months-maybe a year. Day before yesterday the Old Man who writes this story celebrated his forty-eighth birthday, and he long ago said that before he was fifty he was going to take a year off -really off and enjoy life as only an idle mental philosopher can enjoy it. I have been grinding in this town for five years and six months-a long period in the life of a man afflicted with wanderlustand each year my business has increased and each year I have put away more of the needful, so I figure it out that a man is a fool to work all his life making money and not take any time to spend it. I figured it out in this way: The publication stands for nothing but my fancies; my idle vagaries-my clientele is builded purely on my stuff, so why should I employ a man to write what he thought, when my readers were taking the paper to get what I thought? I understand that to suspend a publication, ordinarily, means hard work to re-establish; it might mean that when you returned the field would be oc cupied-but in this case there was no field when I entered, and were forty publications to start, I can yet find enough people who want the pure and painless stuph as it flows from the loom of my genius to pay expenses and make the wheels go 'round. The fact of the business is, I am tired of writing and I take it that my friends are tired of reading-but good manners cause them to refrain from saying so. * * * It is my intention to start sometime early in January for the Pacific Coast country; to remain out that way several months. I have tried several times going to California and leaving behind a date line that must be satisfied and it doesn't work. Just about the time you are attempting to drink in the beauties of Nature; just about the time you plan a trip somewhere, the fact comes home to you that you must grind out a lot of stuff and get it across the continent in time to catch the next date line-therefore the pleasure is marred-the rest you sought isn't in it. I can afford to take a year off and when I return I have bigger schemes in the publication line than I am laying down. That is to say there are many curves I have gotten onto the last six years in this publication and I want to put them into effect. I feel that when a circus has had a successful season it goes into winter quarters and paints its wagons; adds new features and returns in the sweet spring time with the Greatest Show on Earth-so I reasoned, why should not I paint my wagons; why should not I add new features; why shouldn't I go and return with a Greater and a Sublimer Album of Song? It is even so. Or, suppose I never return. Suppose that in the new year that is to be born so soon, before it becomes the old year as the one we are now about to bid good bye, I should be counted among the missing? Suppose that I had continued sitting and dreaming of that time when I would really enjoy a year off from the exacting duties of a business grind, and instead of a year off it would be forever off-then don't you know I would feel like cussing for not going when I had opportunity? Of course you do. The hungry man who puts in all his time fishing and never stops to fry a pan full of 'em is certainly voted a fool-and why should a man put in all his time chasing dollars-chasing them to the cold grave's verge and then fall in trying to clutch a few more? That's the idea that possesses me; that's the idea I can't dismiss with any satisfaction-so some time ago I concluded that, regardless of men's opinions, I would take a year off and see how it felt. It has been my preachment in these columns that money is not all. It has been my contention that the man who falls down and worships Gold for his god must live and die a miserable creature. It has been my belief, always, that there was in the world much beauty, much grandeur-there was happiness if we would seek it. The rank weed of avarice grows tall and ugly, but there are hidden here and there the violets and the tender flowers. If we teach ourselves to see them and enjoy them—it will be adding to the sum of human joy. I know men in this town and in other towns who are too stingy to buy the things their bowels crave-to say nothing of spending money for their mind. * * To educate the brain takes time and patience-you must learn the alphabet. After that you can read and then if you will be liberal with your mind and buy it books and literature it will add to your enjoyment. And if you will let it feast on the landscapes; on the beautiful things that God fashioned and placed in the world for man's eyes alone, you are broader and better. There are men who put their minds in a cave and keep them there-they are too penurious to buy even a newspaper for its feast. I have confided, months ago, to a few friends, my plans and specifications, and invariably I have been met with the proposition: "Why don't you get somebody to write the copy for you and keep the publication going? It's paying, isn't it?" Of course it's paying. If it wasn't I wouldn't leave it if every nerve in my body was racked to the point of delirium. Whoever heard of a perishing newspaper man giving up the ship? Whoever heard of a real newspaper man quitting when the thing didn't pay? In all of God Almighty's bright and beautiful world there was never born such a desperate gambler as the real newspaper man who controlled the destinies of a publication that did not pay. Like a poor relation the paper that doesn't pay stays with him and he stays with it-sublime, majestic in his desperation. Everything has paid from the first year that it started on its mission. It is prosperous today, although for over a year past no one has solicited a subscription for it, and no one has attempted to sell business for its columns. Fact of the business is, I had sincerely hoped it would run down-I hated to take it by the throat and strangle it for a period -hated to wipe out a source of revenuebut I couldn't make the idea of continuance dove-tail with my philosophy, and so I write "Suspension" across its saucy facenot in anger, not in sorrow, but in gleeful joy, such, only I imagine, as the angels know. You know this has been a One Man |