Baltimore Evening Sun (18 November 1912): 6.

THE FREE LANCE

George Moore’s new book is called “Salve.” Watch for a two-column review in the Towel!


Nuxocaput, n, one who voted for the Light street bridge game, a nuthead.


Mlle. Gaby Deslys in the Sunpaper of this morning:

I am very religious and go to church every Sunday.


Alas, for the poor press agent! After working hard for two weeks to convince Baltimore that Gaby is so vermilion that no honest moralist can afford to miss seeing and deploring her, here he finds his labors set at naught by her own incautious confession! Who will pay $5 to see a virtuous church worker, a leader of the Busy Bees, a collector of alms for the heathens? Certainly no sane connoisseur of vice! As for me, I sound the retreat by offering to sell my $5 ticket for 80 cents cash and a good cigar. And anyone who wants to borrow my telescope may have it for the asking.

Aseptocaput, n, a believer in chemical purity, a virtuoso of virtue.

The horrific Democratic Telegram, advised, I daresay, by barristers of sub-normal virtue, tries to cover up its own offendings by a loud discussion of mine. Let me take away its slapstick by making a full confession. I am guilty of all the charges it lays to me. I once stole ten cents from a blind man. I was expelled from Sunday-school for simony. I have broken the Sunday laws every week for 42 years. Down to the year 1904 I wrote at least six square feet of poetry a week. For a whole year, in my youth, I wore detachable cuffs. I am the author of “Love Me and the World Is Mine.” In the intervals of literary endeavor I have made a living kidnapping dogs for vivisectionists. I play the B clarinet, eat with a knife, hate children, sing through my nose, wear ready-made neckties and believe in hell.


But what has all this got to do with the Democratic Telegram’s vile campaign of slander and detraction against the Hon. S. S. Field, LL. D.? What are my puny rimes beside its immoral effort to deprive him of the feudal title of Hon.? Who am I, a mere amateur of felony, beside that unique and incomparable lawbreaker, that bitter foe of hard-won honors, that journalistic Anderson?


Febrocaput, n, a bellower at newspapers, a whooper, a feverhead.

Dr. Donald R. Hooker, in answer to my late argument that patients do not pay physicians to preach at them:

Preventive medicine has already been permitted to interfere too generously with human conduct to be thus summarily restricted by Mr. Mencken. As Dr. William H. Welch said at Atlantic City last June, “although but little appreciated as yet by the community, medicine is destined to play a leading part in the solution of many of the industrial, economic, and social problems of the world.”


Nevertheless, we have yet to hear anything from Dr. Welch upon the double standard of morality, that hobgoblin of Dr. Hooker’s reveries. What is more, I doubt that he will ever enter the discussion. This, I believe, is because Dr. Welch, unlike Dr. Hooker, has a clear understanding of the difference between an industrial, an economic or social question and a purely moral question. I know of no man, indeed, who would be less likely to propose a new amalgamation of the physician and the moralist. The function of the physician is to deal with facts; the function of the moralist is to argue for opinions. The two are at the opposite poles of human thought, and whenever they come together both are losers.


Pennacaput, n, an admirer of Harry, a featherhead, a lighthead, a frailhead.


From the Letter Colutinn of the sweet, sad Towel:

The invention of long-range, sure-sight, repeating, noiseless guns has almost exterminated our native birds.


But not our native merry andrews. The new 14-inch goose-grease rifle on the Towel’s battlements, far from being deadly, is actually life-giving. Two well-directed shells from it, on the morrow of Black Tuesday, revived the August Customer from his syncope and set him to explaining in a voice audible from Bayview to the Claremount abattoir. And as he raged and roared the great vaseline mortars on the roof dropped soft, soapy shells upon his fevered brow, and a row of machine guns drenched hin with cataracts of vanilla witch hazel.


The Bulgars know nothing of gunplay: it is in the Towel office that ballistics is really studied. And a gun crew is ready day and night. Let the Customer show the slightest sign of distress, and at once a projectile of fat bacon goes soaring through the air, N. by N. E., and the Maxims on the thirteenth floor begins to blubber butter.


Ferrocaput, n, an old-fashioned City Councilman, an ironhead.


The circulation of the Evening Sunpaper touched 40,000 on election day and remained at that mark for 10 days. Then the Hon. the Archangel Harry stopped explaining and denouncing—and it dropped back to 39,883.—Adv.


Glutenocaput, n, a Preston man, a gluehead, a puttyhead, a doughhead.


And now poor Wet Hope Chafin goes to join the innumerable caravan of forgotten heroes and heroines along with Gen. Carl Browne, the Hon. Albert Jeremiah Beveridge, Harry Thaw, Herr Most, Steve Brodie, Jake Kilrain, Bathhouse John, J. Harry Tregoe, Senator Aldrich, Uncle Joe Cannon, J. Albert, Hughes, Matt Kilroy, Mary Ellen Lease, Peter Jackson, Chauncey M. Depew, Capt. Webb, Henry George, Jr., Adlai Stevenson, Henny Reitz, Harry Lehr, James O’Neill, Doc Slater, the Rev. Dr. Sam Small, Billy Keeler, Major Fulton, Eduard de Rezske, George Fred. Williams, Mayor Schmitz, Speaker Henderson, Kid Sullivan, Affinity Earls, James R. Keene, Lotta, Maggie Cline, May Irwin, Parson Davies, Dan Brouthers, the Vrooman brothers, the Cherry sisters, Kellar the magician, Sandow, Sheriff Bob Chandler, Jo-Jo the Dog-Faced Man, Dr. Lorentz, Pop Shaw, Elinor Glyn, Lord Dunraven, Tod Sloane, Dowie, Mormon Roberts, Karl Decker, Evangeline Cisneros, Prof. Van Sickle, Jake Frey, Tom Richardson, Sol Warfield, Roger Cull, Charlie Ross, the Hon. Louis Michel, Amos Rusie, Hiram Watty and Maud S.


The city payroll of Baltimore has doubled since 1900, and Harry is still busy with schemes for putting more ward heelers to work. Laugh, suckers, laugh!


Eburnocaput, n, a believer in political mountebanks, an ivoryhead.