Aunt Jane's Nieces at Work
"To begin with, Kenneth
visited the glen one day, to make a sketch, and found his old table-rock
covered with an advertising sign."
"How preposterous!" exclaimed Louise.
"There were three of these huge signs in different parts of the glen,
and they ruined its natural beauty. Kenneth managed to buy up the spaces
and then he scrubbed away the signs. By that time he had come to detest
the unsightly advertisements that confronted him every time he rode out,
and he began a war of extermination against them."
"Quite right," said Patsy, nodding energetically.
"But our friend made little headway because the sympathies of the people
were not with him."
"Why not, sir?" inquired Beth, while Kenneth sat inwardly groaning at
this baring of his terrible experiences.
"Because through custom they had come to tolerate such things, and could
see no harm in them," replied the lawyer. "They permit their buildings
which face the roads to be covered with big advertisements, and the
fences are decorated in the same way. In some places a sign-board has
been built in their yards or fields, advertising medicines or groceries
or tobacco. In other words, our country roads and country homes have
become mere advertising mediums to proclaim the goods of more or less
unscrupulous manufacturers, and so all their attractiveness is
destroyed. Kenneth, being a man of artistic instincts and loving country
scenes, resented this invasion of commercialism and tried to fight it."
"And so ran my head against a stone wall," added the young man, with a
bitter laugh.
"But you were quite right," said Patsy, decidedly. "Such things ought
not to be permitted."
"The people think differently," he replied.
"Then we must educate the people to a different way of thinking,"
announced Louise.
"In three weeks?"
"That is long enough, if we get to work. Isn't it, girls?" said Beth.
"Kenneth accepted the nomination with the idea of having a law passed
prohibiting such signs," explained the lawyer. "But Mr. Hopkins, his
opponent, has used this very thing to arouse public sentiment against
him.
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There was once a king who was very powerful. He had great influence over the wild beasts and animals. Now the tortoise was looked upon as the wisest of all beasts and men. This king had a son named Ekpenyon, to whom he gave fifty young girls as wives, but the prince did not like any of them. The king was very angry at this, and made a law that if any man had a daughter who was finer than the prince's wives, and who found favour in his son's eyes, the girl herself and her father and mother should be killed.
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