Bassetts Scrap Book, Vol 3, No 2
Articles in this issue
- p. 2
An April miscellany of epigrams and observations including the paradox of singleness and wifeliness, a puzzle about whether readers create writers or writers create readers, and civic reflections on the corruption of the Massachusetts Legislature.
- p. 3
A fable by Eugene Heltai in which six people sitting in a garden each receive a windfall apple and each disposes of it according to their nature: the scientist makes a discovery, the merchant sells it, the poet eats it, the lover gives his away, the lawyer sues, and the lady marries the tree's owner.
- p. 4
A brief comic poem from Lippincott's in which a lonesome buttonhole falls in love with a button across the way, reaches her across a thread, but loses her when she is removed from his life by a seamstress.
- p. 6
A historical note explaining that tips originated in popular English coffee-houses two centuries ago, where brass-bound boxes at the door bore the inscription 'To Insure Promptness', whose initials became the word 'tip'.
- p. 7
A grim note that the Russian-Japanese War has so raised the supply of skeletons in Russia that the price has fallen from seven dollars to one dollar and fifteen cents each, with many more still in the proverbial Russian closet.
- p. 4
A comic rustic poem by Joe Cone in which two complainers in a New England general store moan for twenty years that their town is always going downhill, until the storekeeper points out they have been sitting idle and doing nothing while they talked.
- p. 6
A brief philosophical note, attributed to Medical Talk, arguing that medicine and law exist only for transgressors and that anyone who lives a perfectly correct life has no need of either.