Category: Historical Images

George Hart was five years old when he went to stay some months at his uncle’s house. He was very glad to be with his cousins, for he liked good rough games of play, and he did not cry at a knock or a fall.

At home he had no one to play with him but his sister Mary, and she was quite a little thing, and if he had played roughly with her it would have hurt her. George was a good-natured boy, and he did not wish to hurt any one.

When he got to his uncle’s, he thought he should never be tired of all the nice toys and useful things that his cousins were so kind as to shew to him. In the house there was a long room called the workshop, in one part of which was a large bench with saws, hammers, nails, and all kinds of tools.
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I am going to tell you about a little boy who had scarlet fever, and about how he amused himself. He was quarantined in his own room for six weeks, yet he did not have a dull time, after all. He saw no one during those weeks but his father and mother and the doctor.

When Arthur was first taken sick and the doctor said that it was scarlet fever, every unnecessary article of furniture was removed from his room. His bed seemed very necessary, so that remained; also his bureau, washstand, a table, and two chairs. The carpet was taken away, as well as the book-case and all the books. The closet was emptied of all the clothes, and the drawers full of toys were stowed away in the attic.

When so many of his cherished belongings were gone Arthur thought it was a very queer-looking room, and the first time he sat up in bed and looked at the bare floor he said it seemed as if he were in prison.
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I criticized a carpenter working for me recently for using dull tools. He excused himself by saying that he had been too busy to sharpen them. He had been working for weeks with a dull saw, and with a plane which had notches in it, leaving ugly ridges on the boards he was planing.

He had probably wasted more time in working with dull tools than would have been required to sharpen them several times, to say nothing of the inferior work he was turning out.

There are multitudes of people who never do good work because they never prepare for it, never put themselves in a position to do good work—they never sharpened their tools; never trained themselves for it, and they go through life botching their jobs…

Orison Swett Marden

North Judson News – December 24, 1914

—Jeff Burks

A tall pine-tree had been cut down in the forest, and dragged away to a back yard, where it now lay chopped into blocks of wood for fuel, piled up on the top of one another. Near the yard, on the other side of the hedge, was a garden with a green lawn, and out amidst the foliage there peeped forth a charming villa, where a family from the neighbouring town were wont, during the summer months, to come to live, and inhale the balmy air and bask in the country sunshine.

During the long, dreary spring the wooden logs had plenty of time to reflect on their future, but the majority of them were agreed that there was not much to reflect upon, for the fate of a log of firewood was once for all decided, and could not be altered.
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I have been interested in the communications of your correspondent in regard to shingles. I have had over thirty years’ experience in building and repairing roofs. I have taken rifted pine shingles from off several roofs that were worn entirely through, at the line where the water falls from one shingle upon the next one below, while underneath the courses the shingles were as bright as when first laid.

Such is not the fact with sawed and cut shingles, from any kind of timber. The reason is, that sawed and cut shingles are cross-grained, so that water runs through the pores of the wood,—wets the under course, and, in wet seasons, seldom if ever dries.

The agents of decay are, air, water and heat. All are combined on a roof to produce decay, and you have the effect on all roofs made of sawed or cut shingles. I have replaced many roofs of sawed shingles, but they never were half worn; they were rotten and unfit to remain longer.
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