If I knew that would be my last wot I would not change it. That is just
wot it would be.
But again.
What shall we do to avoid getting impregnated with the American dog and
then saturating our systems with the alien dog of Paris?
It is a serious matter, and if we do not want to play the Desdemona act we
must take some timely precautions. What must those precautions be?
Did it ever occur to the average thinking mind that we might squeeze along
for weeks without a dog? Whole families have existed for years after being
deprived of dogs. Look at the wealthy of our land. They go on comfortably
through life and die at last with the unanimous consent of their heirs
dogless.
Then why cannot the poor gradually taper off on dogs? They ought not to
stop all of a sudden, but they could leave off a dog at a time until at
last they overcame the pernicious habit.
I saw a man in St. Paul last week who was once poor, and so owned seven
variegated dogs. He was confirmed in that habit. But he summoned all his
will-power at last and said he would shake off these dogs and become a
man. He did so, and to-day he owns a city lot in St. Paul, and seems to be
the picture of health.
The trouble about maintaining a dog is that he may go on for years in a
quiet, gentlemanly way, winning the regard of all who know him, and then
all of a sudden he may hydrophobe in the most violent manner. Not only
that, but he may do so while we have company. He may also bite our twins
or the twins of our warmest friends. He may bite us now and we may laugh
at it, but in five years from now, while we are delivering a humorous
lecture, we may burst forth into the audience and bite a beautiful young
lady in the parquet or on the ear.
It is a solemn thing to think of, fellow-citizens, and I appeal to those
who may read this, as a man who may not live to see a satisfactory
political reform--I appeal to you to refrain from the dog. He is purely
ornamental. We may love a good dog, but we ought to love our children
more. It would be a very, very noble and expensive dog that I would agree
to feed with my only son.
I know that we gradually become attached to a good dog, but some day he
may become attached to us, and what can be sadder than the sight of a
leading citizen drawing a reluctant mad dog down the street by main
strength and the seat of his pantaloons? (I mean his own, not the dog's
pants. This joke will appear in book form in April. The book will be very
readable, and there will be another joke in it also. eod tf.)
I have said a good deal about the dog, pro and con, and I am not a rabid
dog abolitionist, for no one loves to have his clear-cut features licked
by the warm, wet tongue of a noble dog any more than I do, but rather than
see hydrophobia become a national characteristic or a leading industry
here, I would forego the dog.
Perhaps all men are that way, however. When they get a little forehanded
they forget that they were once poor, and owned dogs. If so, I do not wish
to be unfair. I want to be just, and I believe I am. Let us yield up our
dogs and take the affection that we would otherwise bestow on them on some
human being. I have tried it and it works well. There are thousands of
people in the world, of both sexes, who are pining and starving for the
love and money that we daily shower on the dog.
If the dog would be kind enough to refrain from introducing his justly
celebrated virus into the person of those only who kiss him on the cold,
moist nose, it would be all right; but when a dog goes mad he is very
impulsive, and he may bestow himself on an obscure man. So I feel a little
nervous myself.
Christopher Columbus.
Probably few people have been more successful in the discovering line than
Christopher Columbus. Living as he did in a day when a great many things
were still in an undiscovered state, the horizon was filled with golden
opportunities for a man possessed of Mr. C.'s pluck and ambition. His life
at first was filled with rebuffs and disappointments, but at last he grew
to be a man of importance in his own profession, and the people who wanted
anything discovered would always bring it to him rather than take it
elsewhere.
And yet the life of Columbus was a stormy one. Though he discovered a
continent wherein a millionaire attracts no attention, he himself was very
poor.
Though he rescued from barbarism a broad and beautiful land in whose
metropolis the theft of less than half a million of dollars is regarded as
petty larceny, Chris himself often went to bed hungry. Is it not singular
that the gray-eyed and gentle Columbus should have added a hemisphere to
the history of our globe, a hemisphere, too, where pie is a common thing,
not only on Sunday, but throughout the week, and yet that he should have
gone down to his grave pieless!
Such is the history of progress in all ages and in all lines of thought
and investigation. Such is the meagre reward of the pioneer in new fields
of action.
I presume that America to-day has a larger pie area than any other land in
which the Cockney English language is spoken. Right here where millions of
native born Americans dwell, many of whom are ashamed of the fact that
they were born here and which shame is entirely mutual between the Goddess
of Liberty and themselves, we have a style of pie that no other land can
boast of.
From the bleak and acid dried apple pie of Maine to the irrigated mince
pie of the blue Pacific, all along down the long line of igneous, volcanic
and stratified pie, America, the land of the freedom bird with the high
instep to his nose, leads the world.
Other lands may point with undissembled pride to their polygamy and their
cholera, but we reck not. Our polygamy here is still in its infancy and
our leprosy has had the disadvantage of a cold, backward spring, but look
at our pie.
Throughout a long and disastrous war, sometimes referred to as a
fratricidal war, during which this fair land was drenched in blood, and
also during which aforesaid war numerous frightful blunders were made
which are fast coming to the surface--through the courtesy of participants
in said war who have patiently waited for those who blundered to die off,
and now admit that said participants who are dead did blunder exceedingly
throughout all this long and deadly struggle for the supremacy of liberty
and right--as I was about to say when my mind began to wobble, the
American pie has shown forth resplendent in the full glare of a noonday
sun or beneath the pale-green of the electric light, and she stands forth
proudly to-day with her undying loyalty to dyspepsia untrammeled and her
deep and deadly gastric antipathy still fiercely burning in her breast.
That is the proud history of American pie. Powers, principalities,
kingdoms and hand-made dynasties may crumble, but the republican form of
pie does not crumble. Tyranny may totter on its throne, but the American
pie does not totter. Not a tot. No foreign threat has ever been able to
make our common chicken pie quail. I do not say this because it is smart;
I simply say it to fill up.
But would it not do Columbus good to come among us to-day and look over
our free institutions? Would it not please him to ride over this continent
which has been rescued by his presence of mind from the thraldom of
barbarism and forked over to the genial and refining influences of
prohibition and pie?
America fills no mean niche in the great history of nations, and if you
listen carefully for a few moments you will hear some American, with his
mouth full of pie, make that remark. The American is always frank and
perfectly free to state that no other country can approach this one. We
allow no little two-for-a-quarter monarchy to excel us in the size of our
failures or in the calm and self-poised deliberation with which we erect a
monument to the glory of a worthy citizen who is dead, and therefore
politically useless.
The careless student of the career of Columbus will find much in these
lines that he has not yet seen. He will realize when he comes to read this
little sketch the pains and the trouble and the research necessary before
such an article on the life and work of Columbus could be written, and he
will thank me for it; but it is not for that that I have done it. It is a
pleasure for me to hunt up and arrange historical and biographical data in
a pleasing form for the student and savant. I am only too glad to please
and gratify the student and the savant. I was that way myself once and I
know how to sympathize with them,
P.S.--I neglected to state that Columbus was a married man. Still, he did
not murmur or repine.
Accepting the Laramie Postoffice.
Office of Daily Boomerang, Laramie City, Wy., Aug. 9, 1882.
My Dear General.--I have received by telegraph the news of my nomination
by the President and my confirmation by the Senate, as postmaster at
Laramie, and wish, to extend my thanks for the same.
I have ordered an entirely new set of boxes and postoffice outfit,
including new corrugated cuspidors for the lady clerks.
I look upon the appointment, myself, as a great triumph of eternal truth
over error and wrong. It is one of the epochs, I may say, in the Nation's
onward march toward political purity and perfection. I do not know when I
have noticed any stride in the affairs of state, which so thoroughly
impressed me with its wisdom.
Now that we are co-workers in the same department, I trust that you will
not feel shy or backward in consulting me at any time relative to matters
concerning postoffice affairs. Be perfectly frank with me, and feel
perfectly free to just bring anything of that kind right to me. Do not
feel reluctant because I may at times appear haughty and indifferent, cold
or reserved. Perhaps you do not think I know the difference between a
general delivery window and a three-m quad, but that is a mistake.
[Illustration: A NEW OFFICE OUTFIT.]
My general information is far beyond my years.
With profoundest regard, and a hearty endorsement of the policy of the
President and the Senate, whatever it may be,