Bassetts Scrap Book, Vol 3, No 8
Articles in this issue
- p. 2
Helen Hunt Jackson's celebrated poem praising October's blue skies, falling chestnuts, red apples, and wood-smoke afternoons as the finest weather of the year, better even than June for the lover of nature.
- p. 2
An October miscellany on chestnut burrs, the Saxon name for October as a hurry month, orchard apples as civilisation's highest expression, and the question of whether Mr. Manton never spoke harshly from kindness or from caution.
- p. 5
A linguistic note revealing that until a century ago July was correctly pronounced to rhyme with 'duly', and that anyone who said 'Jew-lie' in Spenser's or Dr. Johnson's time would have been considered extremely ignorant.
- p. 4
A comic story in which Reginald Fitzmaurice writes three alternative answers to an ambiguous marriage proposal — one accepting, one declining — and asks the young lady to kindly post back the one that does not fit the occasion.
- p. 12
A statistical accounting of an average man's fifty years, calculating that he has slept 6,000 days, worked 6,500, amused himself 3,000, been ill 500, and consumed 17,000 pounds of bread and 14,000 pounds of meat.
- p. 7
A medical note challenging the conventional explanation of cramp as the cause of drowning in strong swimmers, arguing that the real cause is heart failure brought on by cold water contracting the blood vessels and overtaxing a fatigued heart.
- p. 7
Tolstoi's argument that armies will be abolished only when individuals refuse to surrender their liberty to others, take personal responsibility for their own actions, and refuse to be made slaves through what he calls animal military training.