Pipefuls | Page 9

will be some, mayhap, to set up the button as rival to the safety
pin in service to humanity. But our homage bends toward the former.
Not only was it our shield and buckler when we were too puny and
impish to help ourselves, but it is also (now we are parent) symbol of
many a hard-fought field, where we have campaigned all over the white
counterpane of a large bed to establish an urchin in his proper gear,
while he kicked and scrambled, witless of our dismay. It is fortunate,
pardee, that human memory does not extend backward to the safety pin
era--happily the recording carbon sheet of the mind is not inserted on
the roller of experience until after the singular humiliations of earliest
childhood have passed. Otherwise our first recollection would
doubtless be of the grimly flushed large face of a resolute parent,

bending hotly downward in effort to make both ends meet while we
wambled and waggled in innocent, maddening sport. In those days
when life was (as George Herbert puts it) "assorted sorrows, anguish of
all sizes," the safety pin was the only thing that raised us above the
bandar-log. No wonder the antique schoolmen used to enjoy computing
the number of angels that might dance on the point of a pin. But only
archangels would be worthy to pirouette on a safety pin, which is
indeed mightier than the sword. When Adam delved and Eve did spin,
what did they do for a safety pin?
Great is the stride when an infant passes from the safety pin period to
the age of buttons. There are three ages of human beings in this matter:
(1) Safety pins, (2) Buttons, (3) Studs, or (for females) Hooks and Eyes.
Now there is an interim in the life of man when he passes away from
safety pins, and, for a season, knows them not--save as mere
convenience in case of breakdown. He thinks of them, in his antic
bachelor years, as merely the wrecking train of the sartorial system, a
casual conjunction for pyjamas, or an impromptu hoist for small
clothes. Ah! with humility and gratitude he greets them again later,
seeing them at their true worth, the symbol of integration for the whole
social fabric. Women, with their intuitive wisdom, are more subtle in
this subject. They never wholly outgrow safety pins, and though they
love to ornament them with jewellery, precious metal, and enamels,
they are naught but safety pins after all. Some ingenious philosopher
could write a full tractate on woman in her relation to pins--hairpins,
clothes pins, rolling pins, hatpins.
Only a bachelor, as we have implied, scoffs at pins. Hamlet remarked,
after seeing the ghost, and not having any Sir Oliver Lodge handy to
reassure him, that he did not value his life at a pin's fee. Pope, we
believe, coined the contemptuous phrase, "I care not a pin." The pin has
never been done justice in the world of poetry. As one might say, the
pin has had no Pindar. Of course there is the old saw about see a pin
and pick it up, all the day you'll have good luck. This couplet,
barbarous as it is in its false rhyme, points (as Mother Goose generally
does) to a profound truth. When you see a pin, you must pick it up. In
other words, it is on the floor, where pins generally are. Their

instinctive affinity for terra firma makes one wonder why they, rather
than the apple, did not suggest the law of gravitation to someone long
before Newton.
Incidentally, of course, the reason why Adam and Eve were forbidden
to pick the apple was that it was supposed to stay on the tree until it fell,
and Adam would then have had the credit of spotting the principle of
gravitation.
Much more might be said about pins, touching upon their curious
capacity for disappearing, superstitions concerning them, usefulness of
hatpins or hairpins as pipe-cleaners, usefulness of pins to schoolboys,
both when bent for fishing and when filed to an extra point for use on
the boy in the seat in front (honouring him in the breech, as Hamlet
would have said) and their curious habits of turning up in unexpected
places, undoubtedly caught by pins in their long association with the
lovelier sex. But of these useful hyphens of raiment we will merely
conclude by saying that those interested in the pin industry will
probably emigrate to England, for we learn from the Encyclopædia
Britannica that in that happy island pins are cleaned by being boiled in
weak beer. Let it not be forgotten, however, that of all kinds, the safety
is the King Pin.

CONFESSIONS OF A "COLYUMIST"
[Illustration]
I can not imagine any pleasant job so full of