Of all the queues which any man or any nation ever gave to another, the
Chinese have supplied us with the most queue-rious. The arrived man from
that celestial part of the world, who is now so industriously engaged
washing for us in New Jersey, and again, making our shoes in
Massachusetts, and who proposes to be our dairymaid, our chambermaid,
our barmaid, and, if BARNUM will go into the humbug business again, our
mermaid, brought the queue on the back of his head when he crossed the
Pacific Ocean, and landed on the coast of California. Thence he conveyed
it across the Plains, and now our mothers are going back to _two_ queues
such as those they wore when the roses which bloomed upon their cheeks
were not produced by rouge, and to comprehend the lessons in the
school-books which they carried was the severest trial which they knew,
except, indeed, the restrained desire to get married. And our fathers
will wear one tail, as did their ancestors, who curled those appendages
gracefully around the limbs of the trees while they played base-ball
with cocoanuts, or visited in that nimble manner in which none other
than monkeys are capable of moving about. Our great American
agriculturist, too, who has ploughed so deeply in the _Tribune_ office,
is going to look like a Chinese; and she, who has given us our Caudle
lectures now for many years past, will exhibit ANNA DICKINSON as a
convert to two tails. Next, he who serves up for us our religion every
once a week in the form of sanctimonious speeches on the subject of
political economy, will let his congregation go behind Plymouth Pulpit
for the purpose of getting their queues for the next Sunday love-feast
by observing his. The "long" and the "short" of the new vanity, however,
will be found in fullest perfection among the bully-bears in Wall
street, who, of all other honest men, are best able to teach the rising
generation the significance of "heads I win, tails you lose." Then,
again, in the far future perhaps some industrious antiquary will exhume
an awful tail of the present generation that was invented by Mrs. H.B.
STOWE, when she looked across the Atlantic Ocean, and interviewed the
ghost of BYRON. The future is going to be glorious and queue-rious for
all who wish to up-braid, and when our fathers pass us, and we see their
heads, we will be convinced that thereby hangs a tail; also, when our
mothers' heads go by, that thereby hang two tails.
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