breakfast yesterday morning. When that lady addresses her husband with
the affix of “my dear,” Jones recognizes a disturbed condition of the
domestic atmosphere. He has had solemn experiences of the way Mrs. Jones
works up a tea-table tornado. Therefore, Jones said nothing. He couldn’t
say less; he was afraid to say more.
“I repeat, my dear, it was late when you returned home last night.”
Jones admitted there was nothing particularly premature about the hour
in question.
“Perhaps, my dear, you wouldn’t find your feelings much hurt if I wished
to know where you spent your evening.”
“Well, you see, love,” began the marital martyr, “there’s a sort of a
kind of a description of--you don’t understand these things, Maria, but
we’re plunged into the throes of a commercial crisis, and I
thought--that is, we thought--a few of us thought, you know--a whole lot
of us thought that we’d have a consultation, you understand--to--to
avert anything in the shape of a pecuniary panic about these diggings.”
“Oh, you consulted, then?”
“Yes; we deliberated. We put our heads together, as it were, and we
decided on a whole lot of things.”
“What time did you decide on breaking up?”
“Well, we had very important matters to discuss. You know the Jewish
financiers--Baron Rothschild, and--and the rest of the Rothschilds, and
the chief rabbis--and--and--and--all of them synagogue fellows, they’ve
been working the oracle--and they’ve had a slap at the Barings.” Here
Jones gasped for breath. He felt that somehow he wasn’t explaining
matters as lucidly as was necessary.
“I think,” interposed Mrs. Jones, “that you’ll have a slap at the
almshouse before you die, at the rate--the poor rate--you’re going on.
What else?”
“Well,” desperately; “Maria, I must say that women can’t grasp the
monetary situation. Don’t you understand that there’s been a withdrawal
of gold from the Bank of England, and they’ve raised their rate to six
per cent., and there’s been a heap of failures, and, in fact, things
have gone so far that, that--”
“That you were so far gone when you came back last night that you took
your boots off at the door-step, and tried to go to sleep on the
scraper. And when you landed up-stairs in your bedroom you told me that
you were at a meeting to pull the Czar of Russia over the coals about
the atrocities on the Jews. You showed me the minutes of the
proceedings. They were in your inside pocket, in a pint bottle labelled
‘Duffy’s Malt.’ Then you said there was a European war just hatching in
the Herzegovina. You wanted to demonstrate the position of the Austrians
and the Russians out there. You tried to do it with the wash-hand basin,
the coal scuttle, and the fire-irons. You sat down in the coal scuttle,
and you stood on your head in the wash basin, and I’m sure you swallowed
some of the irons, for I can’t find the tongs anywhere. Then you tried
to make a speech to the milkman out of the bedroom window this morning;
and now it’s all a commercial crisis. Do you know what I got in your
coat this morning, Mr. Jones? A hairpin, you wretch! A woman’s hairpin,
you antiquated sinner! And there were two or three hairs round it, red
hairs, you crooked-eyed deceiver! I have stood treachery, Mr. Jones, I
have put up with your tantrums and your goings out and comings in for
five years, Mr. Jones, but I can’t, I won’t, I shan’t be bamboozled any
longer with your pint bottles of Russian atrocities and your red-headed
commercial crisis, the hussy.” At this stage Mr. Jones effected a
remarkably rapid retreat, but he has been heard to observe since that it
is really astonishing what an effect a bank-break in London can have in
a quiet kitchen in South Boston.
AT THE COLLEGE SPORTS.
Heigho for the morning, murky and dark,
When, heedless of threatening cloud,
I ventured to visit the green College park,
And mingled along with the crowd.
I am almost now on insanity’s brink,
And this I attribute to
Either a fairy attired in pink
Or an angel whose robe was blue.
The world considered my heart was flint,
And futile were womanly wiles--
Sigh and ogle, whisper and hint,
Glances and glittering smiles.
I meant, uncontrolled by the marital link,
My journey of life to go through,
But in those days I hadn’t met beauty in pink,
To say nothing of beauty in blue.
I’ve had thirty odd years of a bachelor’s life,
Bachelor’s buttons and fare;
And escaped all the bankruptcy, troubles, and strife
That Benedicts weepingly share.
But to-night I believe that I scarcely would shrink
To join the Hymeneal crew,
If the ship were controlled by a captain in pink
Or a lovely commander in blue.
I didn’t go, like the mob, to the place
For frivolous chatter and talk;
I was interested in every race,
Jump and hurdle and walk;
Yet when all was over I’m hanged but I think--
Of course it can hardly be true--
That the quarter was won by a sprinter in pink,
And the mile by a stayer in blue.
It’s over now, and I feel quite wise,
For I mean in futurity’s days
When I go to races to cover my eyes
With glasses to temper my gaze,
Lest my heart intoxicant draughts should drink
Of Cupid’s ambrosial dew,
Supplied by a nymph in bewildering pink
Or equally dangerous blue.
A MUSICAL REVENGE.
I’m sick of music. I’m surfeited with music. I’m engulphed in an ocean
of music. I’m buried beneath a mountain of music. The air I breathe is
oxygenized with music. The food I eat is flavored with music. I go to
sleep to the tootle of the flute next door; my slumbers are oppressed
with the nightmare of a solo on the trombone by a demon across the way,
and I wake to the crash of a grand piano that some fallen angel with
forty-horse-power wrists tortures in the semi-detached gentlemanly
residence at the back. In short, I live in a locality that is so utterly
utter in the matter of harmonic proclivities that I feel wild enough to
undermine and blow it to splinters. The sound of the explosion would be
a welcome change.
But I have had revenge. Ha! ha! It was temporary, but bliss is brief.
For six weeks the pianist behind my bedroom has been ringing the withers
of my soul matutinally with selections from Wagner. For two months the
trombonist over the way has been tearing my vitals asunder by his
frantic efforts to extort unhallowed tones from his instrument. For a
fortnight the flutist next door has congealed my blood with variations
on the “Carnival of Venice.” They have had _one_ night from me. They
won’t want another this side the Day of Judgment.
I gave a musical party. I summoned to my aid my brother who plays the
melodeon. I called to my assistance my friend who lets the tempest of
his heart loose into the cornet. I obtained the powerful alliance of my
cousin who exercises his muscles on the double-bass. I invoked the
tremendous services of an Aberdeen acquaintance, who has been practising
for ten years on the Scotch bagpipes, and still survives. I appealed
successfully to patriotic passions and pecuniary prejudices, and secured
the presence of a fife and drum--principally drum--band from a Grand
Army post.
The first part of the concert lasted two hours. By the end of that time
all the boarders in the street had given their landladies notice to
quit, and I had received three deputations from the outraged inhabitants
of the disturbed district.
But my scheme of vengeance was only budding. I had generously plied the
perspiring performers with copious draughts of Pilsener and Canada malt,
till they felt fit for anything in the way of a musical monstrosity or
instrumental indignity I could ask them to perpetrate on the suffering
locality. Then I marshalled them out in the backyard, and implored them,
as a last personal favor, to make themselves at home, and let each
artist give vent to his feelings in his favorite tune. They vented. The
bagpipes squealed out the “Reel of Tullochgorum,” till it seemed as if
all the pigs in the States had joined in shrill lament over Armour’s
interference with their happiness. The cornet pealed forth “Killarney”
with energy enough to drown the roar of Niagara. The double-bass growled
like a thunder-storm in its last agonies an operatic overture that I had
never heard before, and I hope never, never to listen to again. The
melodeon struggled manfully with “Nancy Lee,” and the fife and drum band
wrestled desperately with “Patrick’s Day,” except half a dozen or so of
its members, who got up a fight in one corner, and added a choice
assortment of yells, shouts, and profane expressions to the glories of
the occasion.
It was gorgeous. In ten minutes we had three fireengines and a division
of police in the street; in half an hour there were several attempts at
suicide of leading residents of the locality; and before our “grand
finale” was finally done with there wasn’t a juvenile or adult within
half a mile that didn’t feel he or she had had music enough to last a
lifetime.
If I am disturbed any more by the operators round me, I shall give them
another dose of my orchestra. I will. I have sworn it.
A LIAR LAID OUT.
We have an amiable tallow-chandler and soap-boiler in our street, who
certainly should have been a novelist. I firmly believe he could give
weight to Baron Munchausen, Jules Verne, M. de Chaillu, or the London
_Times_ in the matter of exaggeration, and romp in an easy winner. The
whoppers that spreader of lies and light can tell would raise the hair
on the head of an Egyptian mummy.
But he met his match last week.
I happened to be in our club-room with Dipps, when there entered an
acquaintance of mine, a gentleman who aspires to legislative honors. Of
course Congressional candidates must acquire the art of so embellishing
and embroidering the naked truth as to make it attractive. Well, my
friend has been studying this science, and he has advanced so far that
he can dispense with facts altogether now. His enemies aver that the
truth isn’t in him. I wouldn’t say that myself. I think it is in
him--very much in him--it’s impossible to get it out of him.
I didn’t think of this, or I wouldn’t have introduced him to Dipps. I
regretted it on the spot. Dipps was smoking a peculiar pipe. The future
member noticed it. He made some slight remark about it. Dipps was all
there. He replied on the instant that that was the identical pipe that
Napoleon III. was smoking when he surrendered at Sedan. He had procured
it from a wandering Teutonic troubadour, who had picked it up when the
Emperor dropped it to hand his sword to his German conqueror.
The statesman expressed no surprise. He merely observed that by a
strange coincidence he possessed the stump of the cigar which had fallen
from Marshal MacMahon’s lips when his eleventh horse was shot under him
at Worth. He had purchased the souvenir from a Zouave with two wooden
legs and a glass eye, who had secured the half-finished weed and was
smoking it out when a fragment of a shell drove it and a couple of
teeth into the back of his head, from which they were extracted by the
regimental surgeon. He had one of the teeth, too, fitted into his own
gums. He showed it to Dipps.
I could see Dipps was rather staggered. He changed the subject. He
exhibited his walking-stick. Remarkable stick, that. It was manufactured
out of one of the railway carriages blown into the river on the night of
the terrible Tay bridge disaster, in Scotland. At the risk of his life,
a diver had brought up a panel out of that carriage for the express
purpose of making that stick.
The embryo representative had another coincidence on hand. He had
another walking-stick at home--made out of the thigh bone of the
engine-driver of that ill-fated train. It was too ghastly a memento to
carry about with him; but he could show it to Dipps at any time, and
would point out the half-cooked appearance of a portion of it, arising
from the fact that the driver was in the habit of sitting on the boiler
in cold weather to warm himself.
Dipps was silent after this for a few minutes. But he wasn’t going to be
put down without a desperate effort. He drew out his large scarf-pin. He
called our attention to what appeared to be a drop of water in the
centre of the colorless stone. No, the stone was not real. It was not a
diamond. It was far more precious. That small dewy globule inside was
worth a hundred diamonds of its size. It had been borne from the mystic
shores of Lake Nyanza by a mighty traveller. It had passed into Dipps’s
hands by a miracle. It was the tear Livingstone had shed when he first
met Stanley. And Dipps smiled a lofty smile at the coming Daniel
Webster, which said, as plainly as a candle-contriver’s grin could say
anything, “Trot out your curiosities, now, old man, and match that if
you’re able.”
Hang me if that expectant recruit to the ranks of the legislators didn’t
squelch Dipps with a third coincidence. It was extraordinary--it was
almost fabulous, he said, but he had another breastpin which contained a
companion tear to Dipps’s. The knight of the soap-pan flatly denied the
assertion. Livingstone had only shed one tear; that tear hadn’t been
divided into suitable lots; it remained intact, complete, unmutilated,
and he (Dipps) was its proud possessor.
“I didn’t say,” gently interposed the coming victim of some future Tom
Reed, “I didn’t say that I had the tear Livingstone shed when the advent
of the New York _Herald_ Central African tourist pumped that saline
particle up. No, sir; but I have a lachrymose relic equally enthralling
in the interest which it must inspire.”
“Pooh!” snorted Dipps contemptuously, “what have you, what can you have,
that approaches within a hemisphere of my historic, geographic
treasure?”
“My friend,” replied the next man to be counted in his absence by the
Speaker, “I do not grudge you the tear that Livingston shed when he
embraced Stanley, for know that I have the identical tear that Stanley
_didn’t_ shed on that occasion, nor since, that I’m aware of.”
MULROONEY.--A TROOPER’S TALE.
We were stanch and brave a company as ever saddled steeds;
When proclamations filled the land, our signatures were deeds;
When Mosby’s horse we fell across, the heads that met our blades
Lost count of stolen cattle, and could plan no future raids.
We blazed with glory, but a cloud around its radiance hung;
Unto the bays that decked our brows a slimy creeper clung--
For word passed round from camp to camp: The man for whom we’d die,
The darling of our devil-dares, Mulrooney, was a spy!
Mulrooney was our squadron’s pride; its star, its guiding lance;
The last to leave a losing fight, the foremost to advance;
His laughter chased the poison from the fever-breeding swamp;
His merry heart and blithesome ways made sunshine in the camp.
So when the provost-marshal came and marched Mulrooney out,
Each trooper’s face with wrath aflame bespoke rebellious doubt;
Till our captain came and “soothered” us, and said, “We’ll have to try
To clear our troop’s bad record that it ever held a spy.”
Oh, our captain was a jewel, with his oily locks of jet,
His shiny spurs of silver, and his gold-fringed epaulette;
The daintiest of kidskin gloves controlled his charger’s reins,
The bluest flood of Norman blood coursed proudly through his veins;
His voice had quite a lordly lisp, in warning or command--
A pearl in iron setting was this leader of our band;
But gem and metal never fused, and that’s the reason why
Our boys despised the perfumed dude and loved the roughspun “spy.”
The morn Mulrooney went away, our “pretty” captain led
Our troop to where a squadron of the Johnnies slept, he said;
But as we trod a darksome gorge, a flash of flame ahead,
A roar of musketry behind, an ambush told, instead!
Entrapped like rats, like rats we fought, in desperate despair--
One sabre ’gainst ten rifles, and no outlet front or rear,
Our captain faded from our sight, while rose a frenzied cry:
“By God! the cur has sold us out! Mulrooney was no spy!”
But while our hearts were quaking and our ranks were melting fast,
There rang athrough the rustling pines a clear, familiar blast;
The bugle-call of Northern foot thrilled on our ears anew,
As swiftly on our hidden foes swept down a line of blue!
One skulking figure sought escape behind the sheltering trees,
A keen-eyed marksman’s bullet brought the coward to his knees,
And as the captor fiercely dragged the wounded captive by,
A shout went up from every throat, “Mulrooney’s got the spy!”
Mulrooney had been hard and fast upon the captain’s trail,
The traitor thought to euchre Pat by placing him in jail,
And, ere the blundering Kerry tongue could tell how matters stood,
Give up his comrades to the wolves that thirsted for their blood.
The captain played his cards with skill--his triumph almost came;
But Irish hearts are always trumps in war’s uncertain game;
And pinioned in his tent that night he heard gay voices nigh
Tell o’er and o’er the story of Mulrooney and the spy.
FOOTNOTES:
[A] This incident was recorded at the time in the Irish newspapers, was
debated in Parliament, and formed the subject of rich comic cartoons in
_Pat_, the _Weekly News_, the _Weekly Freeman_, and _United Ireland_.
[B] Rory, or Capt. Moonlight, is the latest cognomen for the Ribbon or
Whiteboy avenger of landlord oppression.
[C] During the period of Irish obstruction in Parliament, the Speaker
or Chairman of the House of Commons had frequently to preside for
twenty or twenty-four hours at a stretch, during a debate, in the
course of which the Irish members would raise points of order every
five minutes or so.
[D] Allen, Larkin, and O’Brien, executed at Manchester, England, for
their share in the rescue of Col. Kelly and Capt. Deasy, two Fenian
leaders, were buried in the prison grounds, their bodies being refused
to their relatives lest their funeral should be made the occasion of a
demonstration.
[E] On this day William Philip Allen, Michael O’Brien, and Michael
Larkin were hanged in Manchester, England, for the rescue of two Fenian
leaders. Until the sentence of death was actually carried into effect
it was not believed that the first political execution since that of
Robert Emmet would take place. A mass meeting was held at the Old Swan
Cross in Manchester, to welcome the reprieve, but their messenger
brought news of the execution instead.
[F] Allen--nineteen years old.
[G] O’Brien--A brave Union soldier, who had fought in Meagher’s Irish
Brigade.
[H] Larkin--An elderly man, who left a widow and four orphans.
[I] At the explosion which took place in the Tower of London on Jan.
23, 1885, the Grenadier Guards and the Police distinguished themselves
by their frantic efforts to escape from the building.
[J] In April, 1885, the Prince of Wales paid a visit to Ireland. On the
morning of his arrival a placard containing the verses above was found
posted on every dead-wall in the cities and villages of Ireland. The
poem had previously appeared in an American paper.
[K] A victim of English law, whose innocence was proven after he had
been executed.
[L] Give me a kiss.
[M] Calcraft was a notorious English hangman, and Price a British
jailer, whose brutalities to Irish political prisoners will be
remembered for years.
End of Project Gutenberg's An Irish Crazy-Quilt, by Arthur M. Forrester