Tuesday, July 17, 2012

Everything old is new again.

Recently I was looking through a box of old books and found one that caught my eye, A Paragrapher's Reveries by Mary Wilson Little. The book was published in 1904 and is full of pithy little sayings. I wasn't sure what a paragrapher was; however, I learned that it was a person who wrote paragraphs or fillers for newspapers. I also found that what I thought was an obscure book was available in many different formats and sold practically everywhere. This made reading the yellowed pages from an original copy even more interesting to me

Here are a few fillers copied from the book. Some of them may seem outdated and some of them are very applicable today over 100 years later. I'll leave it to you to decide which is which.


--The penalty of success is to be bored by the attentions of people who formerly snubbed you.

--The woman who sits up and cries because her husband is kept very late at the lodge doesn't bring him home any sooner, and only makes her nose as red as his.

--Quilting bees are going out of fashion. The women who can sew are dying of old age.

--Jack Frost makes a capital artist, but his pictures lack warmth.

--It's difficult to see why lace should be so expensive. It is mostly holes, and holes are not expensive.

--The pain caused by a bee sting can be instantly relieved by jumping in a mud puddle.

--In the trials of the canning season preserve your temper when you can.

--Happiness is the well-balanced combination of love, labor, and luck.