The Booming of Acre Hill | Page 4

there is no one who knows. He has disappeared wholly, even in
the metropolis, and, most unfortunately for Acre Hill, with Jocular
Jimson Jones have departed also all its social glories. None of the elect
come to its dances any more. The amateur thespians of the exclusive set
no longer play on the stage of its club-house, and it was only last week
that Mrs. John Jacob Wintergreen passed Mr. Scraggs on the street with
a cold glare of unrecognition.
Possibly when Acre Hill reads this it will understand, possibly not.
Dumfries Corners people understood it right along, but then they
always were a most suspicious lot, and fond of an amusing spectacle
that cost them nothing.

THE STRANGE MISADVENTURES OF AN ORGAN
Carson was a philosopher, and on the whole it was a great blessing that
he was so. No man needed to be possessor of a philosophical
temperament more than he, for, in addition to being a resident of
Dumfries Corners, Carson had other troubles which, to an excitable
nature, would have made life a prolonged period of misery. He was the
sort of a man to whom irritating misfortunes of the mosquito order have
a way of coming. To some of us it seemed as if a spiteful Nature took

pleasure in pelting Carson with petty annoyances, none of them large
enough to excite compassion, many of them of a sort to provoke a quiet
smile. Of all the dogs in the neighborhood it was always his dog that
got run into the pound, although it was equally true that Carson's dog
was one of the few that were properly licensed. If he bought a new
horse something would happen to it before a week had elapsed; and
how his coachman once ripped off the top of his depot wagon by
driving it under a loose telephone wire is still one of the stories of the
vicinity in which he lives. Anything out of the way in the shape of
trouble seemed to choose the Carson household for experimental
purposes. He was the medium by which new varieties of irritations
were introduced to an ungrateful world, but such was his nature that,
given the companionship of Herbert Spencer and a cigar, he could be
absolutely counted on not to murmur.
This disposition to accept the trials and tribulations which came upon
him without a passionate outburst was not by any means due to
amiability. Carson was of too strong a character to be continually
amiable. He merely exercised his philosophy in meeting trouble. He
boiled within, but presented a calm, unruffled front to the world, simply
because to do otherwise would involve an expenditure of nervous force
which he did not consider to be worth while.
I can never forget the sense of admiring regard which I experienced
when in Genoa, while he and I were about to enter our banker's
together, he slipped upon a bit of banana peeling, bruising his knee and
destroying his trouser leg. I should have indulged in profane allusions
to the person who had thoughtlessly thrown the peeling upon the
ground if by some mischance the accident had happened to me. Carson,
however, did nothing of the sort, but treated me to a forcible abstract
consideration of the unthinking habits of the masses.
The unknown individual who was responsible for the accident did not
enter into the question; no one was consigned to everlasting torture in
the deepest depths of purgatory; a calm, dispassionate presentation of
an abstraction was all that greeted my ears. The practice of
thoughtlessness was condemned as a thing entirely apart from the

practitioner, and as a tendency needing correction. Inwardly, I know he
swore; outwardly, he was as serene as though nothing untoward had
happened to him. It was then that I came to admire Carson. Before that
he had my affectionate regard in fullest measure, but now admiration
for his deeper qualities set in, and it has in no sense diminished as time
has passed. Once, and once only, have I known him to depart from his
philosophical demeanor, and that one departure was, I think, justified
by the situation, since it was the culminating point of a series of
aggravations, to fail to yield to which would have required a more than
human strength.
The incident to which I refer was in connection with a fine organ,
which at large expense Carson had had built in his house, for, like all
philosophers, Carson has a great fondness for music, and is himself a
musician of no mean capacity. I have known him to sit down under a
parlor-lamp and read over the score of the "Meistersinger" just as easily
as you or I would peruse one of the lighter novels of the day. This was