LITTLE THINGS.

Lake County Press, Issue 2118, 17 May 1906, Page 7

LITTLE THINGS.

"We grown-ups have no business to smile pa tro nisi ugly at the ignorance of little children," said a man who tries to keep up in everything. "They have an excuse for not knowing tilings, because of their lack of experience, but we men and women can plead no such excuse and often our dearth of general knowledge is really shocking. It is nothing remarkable that a child thinks a dog may grow into a horse, as a little friend of mine did, but it; is certainly astounding that a woman of .'!5 should ask, 'ls a hen turkey one that has been brought up by a hen ?' But J actually heard a woman ask that question the other day. ".\h wife's mother came home from the /.no the other day, bursting with information. 'Hid you know," she asked, 'that an elephant does not eat with its trunk?' 'Of course,' we said and listened for an explanation, 'Well, I've lived all these years and have just found it out,' she said. "I'o lie sure I never saw elephants so very much, but I supposed that when \on dropped peanuts in his trunk they dropped way down the whole length of the trunk into the stomach and I never knew until to-day that an elephant had a mouth.' "A school teacher confessed to me tlie other day that she had Just leai ned what adenoids were, although she had heard the school physician speak of them in connection with her- pupils many times. 'I was too proud to ask what they were,' she said, 'and 1 didn't know how to spell the .word io look it up in the dictionary. I finally found out by overhearing him explain to another teacher.' Another teacher told me that she went straight home from a newspaper bulletin board to a dictionary to find out the meaning of the word •indicted.' 'There it was on the bulletin-board,' she said, 'and people with half the education J have were reading it understandingly, and I hadn't an atom of an idea what it meant. 'The queerest part is that I've used the word again and again myself, but have never read it, or tried to spell it. Consequently, I had no idea that it was a word perfect ly familiar to me.' "My daughter amused herself very much over the ignorance of Iter college room-mate, who came from inland. The girl thought that clams were caught with a net. Hut my daughter stopped laughing when I asl.ed her if she knew that oak leases did not tumble off in the fall with other leaves, and that cherry tree foliage was the first to come out and the last to fall. And then her room-mate had a chance to laugh. "I heard a small boy get the better of his mother by asking her if all tin' common varieties of birds hopped. She answered at once in the affirmative. 'Look at that robin out there.' he commanded, triumphantly, for the bird was running along, with never a hop about him. "There is some excuse for a wof.'iaii not knowing how United States Senators and Congressmen are elected, but I have men friends who do not know. One is an artist who cares for nothing but. pictures, another is a violinist and the third is a publicschool superintendent. And the worst of it is. when I asked the superintendanl if he did not think it would be well for his teachers to lead the newspapers more thoroughly that they might have more general information, he said : 'lf my teachers have any extra time for reading 1 should prefer that they put it on books of pedagogy.' "How many housekeepers know that when a recipe calls for a cup of anything, it means a tea-cup. and not a coffee-cup ? Mow many knowthat a 'spoonful' means a teaspoonful ? How many, when a recipe calls for two tablespoons of melted butter know whether to measure the butter before it is melted or afterward ? A young bride interpretated the instructions. 'Beat six eggs separately.' by heating each egg by itself instead of separating the yolks from the whites. "1 have seen women who think the world of their children slap a piece of court plaster on a burn on the little fingers, running the risk of blood-poisoning, and I have seen intelligent men place a fainting person bolt upright, although they should have learned in their grammar-school days to lay him out Hal. "I wonder how many of us*who read foreign phrases in common use da.v after day know what they mean. A lawyer told me that he had to explain to seven-eighths of his clients what 'nolo contendere,' 'decree nisi," habeas corpus' and other phrases meant, and yet these same clients had been leading the phrases constant ly. "I myself only learned after 1 had a division fence rebuilt, at my own expence —because my neighbour was so ugly that he would not stand for half—that there was such a thing as fence-viewers, who would have condemned the fence and made my neighbour pay half the expense of rebuilding."