Games of the Old World

1895

An Italian editor has been investigating the principal games in fashion in Europe during the dull weather. He finds the present craze in England is clay modeling, the selected victims — and generally misunderstood — being Mr. Gladstone and "Sir Harcourt."

In Belgium, especially in the "Rockersclubs," slow smoking races are the fashion. These end themselves favorably to bets. Big Flemish pipes are loaded with half an ounce of tobacco, and he is winner who can smoke his own through in the longest time without relighting; present record, 67 minutes to one pipe.

Leaping beans are the amusement of Italy and southern France. The inventor has had whole fields of them sown in Mexico and the larvae carefully preserved. The bean leaps best on hot plates, but the southerners paint them as kings and queens and use a little gunpowder. Then the figures go into convulsions, and the game is called "L'anarchie."

Germany, of course, is occupied with the war game, and France has selected "divinertes," of guesses of the future.

Dukes Mixture Tobacco (1895 Advertisement)

—The Long Island Farmer, Jamaica, NY, Jan. 25, 1895, p. 3.

How "All Men Are Born Equal"

1905

The woman born beautiful doesn't bother to educate her intelligence, is spoiled by flattery, is unable to hold the men she attracts; the woman born homely is driven to develop her character and her mind, and so more than overcomes her handicap as against her pretty sister.

The man born clever loses because he wins too easily and has no incentive to that sustained effort which alone achieves success; the man born "slow" develops patience, assiduity, balance and, best of all, tenacity.

It comes near to being a universal rule that strong points and weak ones just about offset each other in any human being at the start, and that the development is a matter for the man himself to determine. And there is no fatal handicap except the disposition to regard one's handicap as fatal. — Saturday Evening Post.


Use Pipes of Pure Gold

There is an endless variety of substances of which pipes are made. In China the stems are of bamboo. In India leather stems are used, in Persia sweet jasmine, in Asia Minor cherry wood. In the Philippine Islands a richer material is available, for the natives hollow out sold nuggets which they find in the torrent beds, and use them as pipe bowls.