saturday is a half holiday at mr. mcclure’s village of syndicate. on that day the noon whistle means complete cessation of work, as it always has in every one of the departments of mr. mcclure’s great enterprise.
on the occasion of a recent saturday visit to this model settlement i found scores of well-fed, happy-looking prosers and poets riding their bicycles up and down the village street or sitting in rows on the fence rails eagerly discussing the condition of the literary market and the business prospects for the coming year. in the large playground which lies to[pg 317] the north of the village an exciting game of football was in progress between two picked elevens, one selected from the various “reminiscence-of-celebrities” gangs employed about the works, and the other made up from the day shift of “two-rhyme-to-the-quatrain” poets.
the scotch dialect authors were seated on the piazza in front of their quarters, mending their shoes, washing their clothes, and preparing in other ways for the impending “sawbath.” mr. mcclure tells me that they are very shy and suspicious, and refuse to mingle socially with the other hands. one of them, dr. bawbee macfudd, was confined to his room with brain fever, the result of having been asked to spend something the last time he went out of the house.
just beyond the barn devoted to the scotchmen mr. mcclure showed me a building which he erected last spring and which is now used as a canning factory[pg 318] and warehouse for the storage of perishable goods.
“you see,” said mr. mcclure, “we are doing a very large business here, and supplying not only my own magazine and newspaper syndicate with matter, but also various other publications, which i cannot name for obvious reasons, so it frequently happens that we find ourselves at the close of some holiday season with a number of poems, stories, or essays relating to that particular holiday left on our hands. these ‘perishable goods,’ as we call them in the trade, were formerly a total loss, but now we can and preserve them until the holiday comes round again.”
mr. mcclure directed my attention to the wooden shelves which encircled the main room of the building, and which contained long rows of neat tin cans and glass jars, hermetically sealed and appropriately labelled. in the thanksgiving[pg 319] department were to be found cans containing comic turkey dinners in prose and verse, “first thanksgiving in america” stories of the old plymouth rock brand so popular in new england, serious verses designed for “woman and home” departments in provincial newspapers, and other seasonable goods. some of these were marked with a red x, indicating, as mr. mcclure informed me, that they were of the patent adjustable brand, made popular throughout the country by his syndicate, and could be changed into christmas goods by merely altering the name of the holiday.
we were still standing there, when one of the hands, who seemed to be working overtime, appeared with a step-ladder, climbed up to one of the highest shelves, and brought down three dusty washington’s birthday jars, which he opened on the spot. two were in good condition, but the third containing a[pg 320] poem on “our uncrowned king,” was found to be in a bad state of preservation and emitted such a frightful odor that the workman hastily carried it outside the building, mr. mcclure and i following to see what was the matter with it. the poem was lifted out with a pair of pincers, and we saw in an instant that decay had started in the third verse, in which “mount vernon” was made to rhyme with “burning,” and had spread until the whole thing was ruined.
“i am very lucky to get off as easily as this,” said mr. mcclure, as he noted the name of the author of the defective rhyme, “because it sometimes happens that these jars containing rotten poetry explode and do a great deal of damage.
“these are our odd lots,” he explained, as we continued our tour of inspection. “here are a few cans of ‘envois’ for use in the repair shops, and here are a lot of hitherto unpublished[pg 321] portraits of people and pictures of houses and babies and all sorts of things that have been left over from our serials, and will come in handy for the grant memoirs. those pictures of the children of old zachariah corncob, who used to live next door to lincoln, will do very well for benjamin franklin or henry clay in infancy, and there is that house that mr. and mrs. elizabeth stuart phelps ward used to live in, left over from a lot of forty that i contracted for last year; that will look well as the house that would be occupied by andrew jackson if he were alive now and lived in massachusetts. you see, i am reducing the literary business to a system, and my plan is to have nothing go to waste.”
“it seems to me, mcclure,” i remarked, as we left the building, “that you have everything here but love poems; won’t they bear canning, too?”
“certainly,” replied the great manufacturer, “but i have to put them all in cold storage, even during the winter months.”