Word: devilments
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Dates: during 1920-1929
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...when Moby Dick* was a virile old devil. But intelligence from British Columbia marks the passing of the masthead muezzins. A Victoria whaling company has chartered seaplanes to be carried on shipboard to the whaling grounds, launched overside and sent spinning over the ocean in far circles. High over the sea, air observers can "spot" a whale even though he lurk far below the surface; can flash his nautical bearings even to an invisible whaleship and keep leviathan in sight until the harpoons arrive...
Artist Spencer, though a Harvard man, never cared for Boston. He was born in Harvard, Neb., lives now in New Hope, Pa., has studied under Chase and Henri, is a member of the National Academy. His picture "Mountebanks and Thieves" depicts U. S. slum life with its gay devil-may-care foreground, and the gaunt bleak tenements, brooding, relentless in the background...
...follow anything that smacks of religion are on the wrong road. We should turn rather from Christ to Abou Ben Adhem, who did not love God but rather his fellow men. For when our worship of Mammon has filled our purses to satiety we turn not to fighting the Devil, or Sin, or ourselves, but to social reform, to fighting tuberculosis or hookworm, or vice. The idea is presumably that if we try to patch up the botch Jehovah has made of keeping mankind in running order, Jehovah will repay our time and expense by deputing an angel...
There were other Commencement vanities savoring less of the flesh and the devil. On the great day the ladies of the Colony turned out in full regalla, calculated to shame the lilies of the field. There is a famous story of an elderly dame who sat up all night before the 1758 Commencement to save her hair, done up the previous evening by the coiffeuse, who had no other tine for that particular lady. Another writer on Commencement--one bitter toward the fop-pishdress--declares that a roomy family coach could carry but two ladies, one sitting forward...
...these, after all, were petty devil-trios, and for a first-hard account of the celebration, one is referred to the Satyrical Description, found in "The Magazine of History, with Notes and Queries," reprinted at Tarrytown, New York...