A Family With Faith in Asbestos

Short Stories
1922

The late Mrs. George Gould hated any desecration of the Sabbath. Motoring one summer Sunday in Lakewood, she encountered a family whose fortune had been made in asbestos. The rich asbestos makers were picnicking, fathers and sons over whisky and poker, mother and the girls with cigarets and bridge. Mrs. Gould drew up to speak to her acquaintances. "Well," she said pleasantly, "I didn't know you Smiths had such faith in your asbestos."

A storyette that dates to the eighteenth century is as follows: Dr. Johnson once met the village postman one summer afternoon. The postman observed that he had still a mile to walk just to deliver one newspaper. "My goodness!" exclaimed the sympathetic doctor, "I'd never go all that distance for such a trifle. Why don't you send it by post?"

Former Postmaster General Hays, as every one knows, is an advocate of the air mail. "Of course, it gets criticized," he said, "and criticism is a good thing, but it can be run into the ground. I am reminded of the vaudeville producer who muttered as he read the press-notices of his program, 'These critics are thorough, all right. They don't leave a turn unstoned.' "

With reference to the millennium, Samuel Gompers recently said: "It is still a long way off, of course, but the workman is not the downtrodden slave he once was." He quoted the case of the tennis pro who was giving a new club member some pointers. "Hold your racket loosely, sir," he said. "Oh! more loosely! You hold it as stiff as if you were a hod-carrier." "But I am a hod-carrier," said the new member mildly.

The southern Californian may think himself an adept making seductive pictures of his end of the state, but he can still learn from the Honolulan, out in the north Pacific. Down there they say a drummer from San Francisco sojourned a month, and when they took him to the homeward-bound steamer and put leis around his neck and sang "Aloha Oi" to him a few times, he cried like a baby and said he had forgotten his wife's first name.