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If you enjoy our show, please write a review on the podcast app. Also, shares with a friend. This episode is brought to you by our Patreon supporters and by Lathered soap Tonight, we'll read an excerpt from the 1912 book Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town from a chapter called The Speculations of Jefferson Thorpe. You won't need to listen to the first episode in order to listen to this episode as they are non-sequential vignettes. However, if you would like to find the first episode in this series, it aired on August 23rd, 2019. This humor is an affectionate account of small-town life in the fictional town of Mariposa is inspired by the author's experience living in Ontario, Canada. The book illustrates the inner workings of life in Mariposa from business to politics to steamboat disasters.

In this vignette, we learn about the town's barber shop and the leisurely art of the afternoon Let's get cozy.

Close your eyes. Let's get cozy.

Close your eyes. Relax your body into the softness of your body. Now, take a few deep breaths. The speculations of Jefferson Thorpe. It was not until the mining boom at the time when everybody went simply crazy over the cobalt and porcupine mines of the new silver country near the Hudson Bay that Jefferson Thorpe reached what you might call public importance in the town of Mariposa. Of course, everybody knew Jeff and his little barber shop that stood just across the street from Smith's hotel. Everybody knew him and everybody got shaved there. From early morning when the commercial travelers off the 630 Express got shaved into the resemblance of human beings, there were always people going in and out of the barbershop. Mullins, the manager of the exchange bank, took his morning shave from Jeff as a form of resuscitation. With enough wet towels laid on his face to stew him and with Jeff moving about in the steam, razorer in hand has grave as an operating surgeon. Then, as I think I said, Mr. Smith came in every morning and there was a tremendous outpouring of Florida water and rums, essences and revivers and renovators, regardless of expense. What with Jeff's white coat and Mr. Smith's flowered waste coat and the red geranium in the window and the Florida water and the double extract of hyacinth. The little shop seemed multi-colored and luxurious enough for the anix of Assultans' era. But what I mean is that, till the mining boom, Jefferson Thorpe never occupied a position of real prominence in Mariposa.

You couldn't, for example, have compared him with a man like Golkotha Gangam, who, as undertaker,

stood in a direct relation to life and death. Or, to Traylonny, the Postmaster, for due money from the federal government of Canada and was regarded as virtually a member of the Dominion cabinet. Everybody knew Jeff and liked him, but the odd thing was that Tilly made money, nobody took any stock in his ideas at all. It was only after he made the cleanup that they came to see what a splendid fellow he was. Level-headed, I think, was the term. Indeed, in the speech of Mariposa, the highest form of endowment was to have the headset on horizontally. As I say, it was when Jeff made money that they saw how gifted he was was and when he lost it.

But still, there's no need to go into that.

I believe it's something the same in other places too.

The barber shop, you will remember,

stands across the street from Smith's hotel

and stairs at it it face to face. It is one of those wooden structures. I don't know whether you know them, with a false front that sticks up above its real height and gives it an air at once rectangular and imposing. It is a form of architecture much used in Mariposa and understood to be in keeping with the pretentious and artificial character of modern business. There is a red, white, and blue post in front of the shop, and the shop itself has a large square window out of proportion to its little flat face. Painted on the pains of the window is the remains of a legend that once spelled barbershop, executed with the flourishes that prevailed in the golden age of sign painting in Mariposa. Through the windows, you can see the geraniums in the windows shelf, and behind them, Jeff Thorpe, with his little black skull cap on, and his spectacles drooped upon his nose as he bends forward in the absorption of shaving. As you open the door, it sets in violent agitation, a coiled spring up above and abel that almost rings. Inside there are two shaving

chairs of the heavier or electrocution pattern with mirrors in front of them and pigeonholes with the individual shaving mugs. There must be ever so many of them, fifteen or sixteen. It is the current supposition of each of Jeff's customers that everyone else but himself uses a separate mug. One corner of the shop is partitioned off and bears the sign, hot and cold baths, fifty cents. There has been no bath inside the partition for twenty years. Only old newspapers and a mop. Still, it lends distinction somehow. Just as do the faded cardboard signs that hang against the mirror with the legends, Turkish shampoo, 75 cents, and Roman massage, one dollar. They said commonly in Mariposa that Jeff made money out of the barber shop. He may have, and it may have been that that turned his mind to investment, but it's hard to see how he could. a shave cost haircut-fifteen, or the two if you liked for a quarter. And at that, it is hard to see how he could make money, even when he had both chairs going and shaved first and one, and then in the other., in Mariposa, shaving isn't the hurried, perf bunked-ery thing that it is in the city. A shave is looked upon as a form of physical pleasure, and lasts anywhere from 25 minutes to 3-quarters of an hour. In the morning hours, perhaps there was a semblance of haste about it, but in the long quiet of the afternoon, as Jeff leaned forward towards the customer and talked to him in a soft, confidential monotone, like a portrait painter. Their razor would go slower and slower and pause and stop. and pause again till the shave died away into the mere drows of conversation. At such hours the Mariposa Barber Shop would become a very palace of slumber and as you waited your turn in one of the wooden armchairs beside the wall, what with the quiet of the hour and the load-roan of Jeff's conversation, the buzzing of the flies against the window pane and the measured tick of the clock above the mirror. Your head sank dreaming on your chest and the marrow pose a news packet rustled unheated on the floor. It makes one drowsy just to think of it. The conversation, of course, was the real charm of the place. You see Jefferson's forte or specialty was information. He could tell you more things within the compass of a half-hour shave than you get in days of laborious research in an encyclopedia. Where he got it all, I don't know, but I am inclined to think it came more or less out of the newspapers. In the city, people never read the newspapers, not really. Only little bits and scraps of them. But in Mariposa it's different. There they read the whole thing from cover to cover, and they build up on it in the course of years a range of requirement that would put a college president to the blush. who has ever heard Henry Mullins and Peter Glover talk about the future of China will know just what I mean. And of course, Jeff's conversation was that he could sue it to his man every time. He had a kind of divination about it. There was a certain kind of man that Jeff would size up sideways as he strapped the razor. And in whose ear he would whisper, I see where St. Louis has took forstrate games off Chicago, and so hold him fascinated to the end. In the same way he would say to Mr. Smith, I see where it says that this flying squirrel run a dead heat for the king's plate. To a humble intellect like mine, he would explain and fall the relations of the Kisar to the German rich dog. But first and foremost, Jeff's specialty in the way of conversation was finance and the money market. The huge fortunes that a man with the right kind of head could make. I've known Jefferson to pause and is shaving with the razors suspended in the air as long as five minutes while he described, with his eye half closed, exactly the kind of a head a man needed in order to make a haul or a clean up. It was evidently simply a matter of the head. And as far as one could judge, Jeff's own was the very type required. I don't know just at what time or how Jefferson first began his speculative enterprises, it was probably in him from the start. There is no doubt that the very idea of such things as traction stock went to his head. And whenever he spoke of Mr. Carnegie and Mr. Rockefeller, the yearning tone of his voice made it as soft as lathered soap. I suppose the most rudimentary form of his speculation was the hens. That was years ago. He kept them out at the back of his house, which itself stood up a grass plot behind and beyond the barbershop. And in the old days, Jeff would say with a certain note of pride in his voice that the woman had sold as many as two dozen eggs in a day to the summer visitors. But what was reading about a malgum made it as bestos and consolidated copper and all that, the hens began to seem pretty small business. And in any case the idea of two dozen eggs at a cent a piece almost makes one blush. I suppose a good many of us have felt just as Jeff did about our poor little earnings. Anyway, I remember Jeff telling me one day that he could take the whole lot of the hens and sell them off and crack the money into Chicago wheat on margin and turn it over in 24 hours. He did it too.

Only somehow when it was turned over it came upside down on top of the hands. And after that the henhouse stood empty, and the woman had to throw away chicken feet every day at a dead loss of perhaps a shave and a half. But it made no difference to Jeff. For his mind had floated away already on the possibilities of what he called displacement mining on the Yukon. So you can understand that when the mining boom struck Mariposa, Jefferson Thorpe was in it right from the very start. Why? No wonder it seemed like the finger of providence. was this great silver country spread out to north of us, where people had thought there was only a wilderness and right at our very doors. You could see, as I saw, the night express going north every evening.

For all one new Rockefeller Carnegie or anyone might be in on it. Here was the wealth of Calcutta, as the Mariposa news packet put it poured out at our very feet. So no wonder the town went wild. All day in the street, you could hear men talking of veins and smelters and dips and deposits and faults. The town hummed with it like a geology class on exam day. And there were men about the hotels with mining outfits and dungage bags. And at Smith's bar, they would hand chunks of rock up and down, some of which would run as high as ten drinks to the bound. The fever just caught the town and ran through it. Within a fortnight, they put a partition down Robertson's coal and wood office and opened the Mariposa mining exchange. And just about every man on the main street started buying script. Then presently, young Fizzle Chip, who had been teller in Mullins Bank, and that everybody had thought a worthless dope before, came back from the cobalt country with a fortune, and loathed around in the Mariposa House, in English khaki, and a horizontal hat, drunk all the time and everybody holding him up as an example of what it was possible to do if you tried. They all went in. Jim Elliott mortgaged the inside of the drugstore and jammed it into twin temvaggy. Pete Glover at the hardware store bought nippewa stock at 13 cents and sold it to his brother at 17 and bought it back in less than a week at 19. They didn't care. They took a chance. Judge Pepperyly put the rest of his wife's money into Temescam, Common, and lawyer McCartney got the fever too, and put every cent that his sister possessed into tulip preferred. They all went in, or all except Mr. Smith. You see, Mr. Smith had come down from there, and he knew all about rocks and mining and canoes in the North Country. He knew what it was to eat flower-baked dampers under the lee side of a canoe propped among the underbrush and to drink the last drop of whiskey within 50 miles. else. Mr. Smith had mighty little use for the north, but what he did do was to buy up enough early potatoes to send 15 carload lots into coal bald at a profit of $5 a bag. Mr. Smith, I say, hung back. But Jeff Thorpe was in the mining boom right from the start. He bought in on the Nippoam mine, even before the interim prospectus was out. He took a block of a hundred shares of a bitterly bitterly development at fourteen cents. And he and Johnson, the livery stablekeeper next door, formed a syndicate and got a thousand shares of Metagomileic at three cents, and then unloaded them on one of the sausage men at Nettley's butcher shop at a clear cent percent advance. Jeff would open a little drawer below the mirror in the barber shop and show you all kinds and sorts of cobalt country mining certificates, blue ones, pink ones, green ones, yellow ones, without landish and fascinating names on them, that ran clear from the motto-wa to the Hudson Bay. And right from the start he was confident of winning.

There ain't no difficulty to it. He said,

There's lots of silver up there in that country.

And if you buy some here and some there,

You can't fail to come out somewhere. I don't say.

He used to continue with the scissors open and ready to cut. Some of the green horns won't get bit, but if a feller knows the country and keeps his head level. He can't lose. Jefferson had looked at so many prospects and so many pictures of mines and pine trees and smelters that I think he'd forgotten that he'd never been in the country. Anyway, what's 200 miles? To an onlooker, it certainly didn't seem so simple.

I never knew the meanness, the trickery of the mining business, the sheer obstinate determination of the bigger capitalists not to make money when they might, till I heard the accounts of Jeff's different minds.

Take the case of the crown jewel. There was a good mind, simply going to ruin for lack of common sense. She ain't been developed, Jeff would say. There's silver in her so you could dig her out with a shovel. She's full of it, but they won't get at her. Then he'd take a look at the pink and blue certificates of the crown jewel and slam the drawer on them and disgust. Worst than that was the silent pine, a clear case of incompetence. lack of engineering skill was all that was keeping the silent pine for making a fortune for its holders. The only trouble with that mine said Jeff, said they won't go deep enough, they follow the vein down to where it's kind of thinned out and then they quit. If they just go right into her good they'd get it. They'd down their own right. But perhaps the worst case of all was the Northern Star.

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