“We went back to England together. When we arrived at the customs shed, Syrie said: ‘Always choose the oldest customs official. No chance of promotion.'” — Somerset Maugham, quoting his wife
Society
Sharp Dealing
An episode from P.T. Barnum’s childhood in Bethel, Connecticut:
‘What is the price of razor strops?’ inquired my grandfather of a peddler, whose wagon, loaded with Yankee notions, stood in front of our store.
‘A dollar each for Pomeroy’s strops,’ responded the itinerant merchant.
‘A dollar apiece!’ exclaimed my grandfather; ‘they’ll be sold for half the money before the year is out.’
‘If one of Pomeroy’s strops is sold for fifty cents within a year, I’ll make you a present of one,’ replied the peddler.
‘I’ll purchase one on those conditions. Now, Ben, I call you to witness the contract,’ said my grandfather, addressing himself to Esquire Hoyt.
‘All right,’ responded Ben.
‘Yes,’ said the peddler, ‘I’ll do as I say, and there’s no backout to me.’
My grandfather took the strop, and put it in his side coat pocket.
Presently drawing it out, and turning to Esquire Hoyt, he said, ‘Ben, I don’t much like this strop now I have bought it. How much will you give for it?’
‘Well, I guess, seeing it’s you, I’ll give fifty cents,’ drawled the ‘Squire, with a wicked twinkle in his eye, which said that the strop and the peddler were both incontinently sold.
‘You can take it. I guess I’ll get along with my old one a spell longer,’ said my grandfather, giving the peddler a knowing look.
The strop changed hands, and the peddler exclaimed, ‘I acknowledge, gentlemen; what’s to pay?’
‘Treat the company, and confess you are taken in, or else give me a strop,’ replied my grandfather.
‘I never will confess nor treat,’ said the peddler, ‘but I’ll give you a strop for your wit;’ and suiting the action to the word, he handed a second strop to his customer. A hearty laugh ensued, in which the peddler joined.
‘Some pretty sharp fellows here in Bethel,’ said a bystander, addressing the peddler.
‘Tolerable, but nothing to brag of,’ replied the peddler; ‘I have made seventy-five cents by the operation.’
‘How is that?’ was the inquiry.
‘I have received a dollar for two strops which cost me only twelve and a half cents each,’ replied the peddler; ‘but having heard of the cute tricks of the Bethel chaps, I thought I would look out for them and fix my prices accordingly. I generally sell these strops at twenty-five cents each, but, gentlemen, if you want any more at fifty cents apiece, I shall be happy to supply your whole village.’
Our neighbors laughed out of the other side of their mouths, but no more strops were purchased.
(From his 1855 autobiography.)
Uh-Oh
Every unjust act is inexpedient;
No unjust act is expedient;
No expedient act is unjust;
Therefore every expedient act is just.
— Ralph L. Woods, How to Torture Your Mind, 1969
Appeal
Oh Lord, Thou knowest that I have lately purchased an estate in fee simple in Essex. I beseech Thee to preserve the two counties of Middlesex and Essex from fire and earthquakes; and as I have also a mortgage at Hertfordshire, I beg of Thee also to have an eye of compassion on that county, and for the rest of the counties, Thou may deal with them as Thou art pleased. Oh Lord, enable the bank to answer all their bills and make all my debtors good men, give a prosperous voyage and safe return to the Mermaid sloop, because I have not insured it, and because Thou has said, ‘The days of the wicked are but short’, I trust in Thee that Thou wilt not forget Thy promise, as I have an estate in reversion, which will be mine on the death of the profligate young man, Sir J. L. …g.
Keep my friends from sinking, preserve me from thieves and housebreakers, and make all my servants so honest and faithful that they may always attend to my interest and never cheat me out of my property night or day.
— John Ward, onetime M.P. for Weymouth, quoted in M.C. D’Arcy, The Mind and the Heart of Love, 1947
(This must be satire, but I haven’t been able to learn anything more about it.)
04/01/2025 UPDATE: Apparently the “prayer” was discovered among Ward’s papers after his death in 1755 — possibly he was condemning self-dealing in Parliament at the time. (Thanks to readers Brieuc de Grangechamps and Jon Anderson.)
Reflection
If your nose is close to the grindstone
And you hold it there long enough
In time you’ll say there’s no such thing
As brooks that babble and birds that sing
These three will all your world compose
Just you, the stone and your poor old nose.
— “From a two hundred-year-old stone in a country cemetery,” quoted in Christina Foyle, So Much Wisdom, 1984
Blowback
Several claimants have been put forth as the originators of the modern tropical cyclone ‘naming’ system. Australian weather meteorologist, Clement L. Wragge, is one of the best-established holders of the title. … Most ingeniously, he gained a measure of personal revenge by christening some of the nastiest storms with politicians’ names such as Drake, Barton, and Deakin. Modern hurricane researcher Chris Landsea noted that, by using such a personal naming system, Wragge could publicly describe a politician (say one who was less than generous with weather-bureau appropriations) as ‘causing great distress’ or ‘wandering aimlessly about the Pacific.’
— Randy Cerveny, Freaks of the Storm, 2006
The Lunatic
Man is so intelligent that he feels impelled to invent theories to account for what happens in the world. Unfortunately, he is not quite intelligent enough, in most cases, to find correct explanations. So that when he acts on his theories, he behaves very often like a lunatic. Thus, no animal is clever enough, when there is a drought, to imagine that the rain is being withheld by evil spirits, or as a punishment for its transgressions. Therefore you never see animals going through the absurd and often horrible fooleries of magic and religion. No horse, for example, would kill one of its foals in order to make a wind change its direction. Dogs do not ritually urinate in the hope of persuading heaven to do the same and send down rain. Asses do not bray a liturgy to cloudless skies. Nor do cats attempt, by abstinence from cats’ meat, to wheedle the feline spirits into benevolence. Only man behaves with such gratuitous folly. It is the price he has to pay for being intelligent, but not, as yet, quite intelligent enough.
— Aldous Huxley, Texts and Pretexts, 1932
Memento
Between 1741 and 1760, when a baby was left at London’s Foundling Hospital, the staff encouraged the mother to provide some token that could be used as an identifying record — a note, a letter, or some other small object. Usually a piece of fabric was provided by the mother or cut from the child’s clothing, and these were attached to registration forms and then bound into ledgers.
Altogether about 5,000 babies received such tokens. The example above bears the message “This Silver Ribbon is desired to be preserved as the child’s mark of distinction.” (Ribbons were recognized symbols of love, especially in circumstances of loss and separation.) Today these pieces of fabric form the largest collection of everyday textiles surviving in Britain from the 18th century.
On the occasion of an exhibition of the surviving swatches at the hospital in 2010, University of Hertfordshire historian John Styles said, “The textiles are both beautiful and poignant, embedded in a rich social history. Each swatch reflects the life of a single infant child. But the textiles also tell us about the clothes their mothers wore, because baby clothes were usually made up from worn-out adult clothing. The fabrics reveal how working women struggled to be fashionable in the eighteenth century.”
No Comment
“Lady Dillon told Sir F. Chantrey that English women were more buxom than Italian women. The delicate way she put it was, ‘you will find that Italian women can sit much closer to a wall than English.'”
— George Lyttelton’s Commonplace Book, 2002
Fair and Square
From Good-Bye to All That, poet Robert Graves’ 1929 account of his experiences in World War I:
Beaumont had been telling how he had won about five pounds’ worth of francs in the sweepstake after the Rue du Bois show: a sweepstake of the sort that leaves no bitterness behind it. Before a show, the platoon pools all its available cash and the survivors divide it up afterwards. Those who are killed can’t complain, the wounded would have given far more than that to escape as they have, and the unwounded regard the money as a consolation prize for still being here.
In 2003, the Journal of Political Economy reprinted this paragraph with the title “Optimal Risk Sharing in the Trenches.”