p. 9 | SWALLOWING DIRT

Pacific Press Publishing Company · Oakland, California · Jan 16, 1896

SWALLOWING DIRT.

The humorist, Bob Burdette, gives this recipe for swallowing dirt:—

“My homeless friend with the chromatic nose, while you are stirring up the sugar in a ten-cent glass of gin, let me give you a fact to wash down with it. You may say you have longed for years for the free, independent life of a farmer, but you have never been

able to get money enough to buy a farm. But there is where you are mistaken. For some years you have been drinking a good improved farm at the rate of one hundred square feet at a gulp. If you doubt this statement, figure it out for yourself. An acre of land contains 43,560 feet; estimating, for convenience, the land at $43.56 an acre, you will see that it brings the land to just one mill per square foot. Now pour down the fiery dose and imagine you are swallowing a strawberry patch. Call in five of your friends and have them help you gulp down that 500-foot garden. Get on a prolonged spree some day and see how long it will take to swallow a pasture land to feed a cow. Put down that glass of gin; there is dirt in it—three hundred feet of good, rich dirt, worth $43.56 per acre.”