|IT is rather interesting to watch the manner by which old customs have
been slightly changed and handed down from age to age. Peculiarities of
old traditions still linger among us, and are forked over to posterity
like a wappy-jawed teapot or a long-time mortgage.. No one can explain
it, but the fact still remains patent that some of the oddities of our
ancestors continue to appear from time to time, clothed in the changing
costumes of the prevailing fashion.
Along with these choice antiquities, and carrying the nut-brown flavor
of the dead and relentless years, comes the amende honorable. From the
original amende in which the offender appeared in public clothed only in
a cotton-flannel shirt, and with a rope about his neck as an evidence a
formal recantation, down to this day when (sometimes) the pale editor,
in a stickful of type, admits that "his informant was in error," the
amende honorable has marched along with the easy tread of time. The
blue-eyed moulder of public opinion, with one suspender hanging down
at his side, and writing on a sheet of news-copy paper, has a more
extensive costume, perhaps, than the old-time offender who bowed in the
dust in the midst of the great populace, and with a halter under his ear
admitted his offense, but he does not feel any more cheerful over it.
I have been called upon several times to make the amende honorable, and
I admit that it is not an occasion of mirth and merriment. People who
come into the editorial office to invest in a retraction are generally
very healthy, and have a stiff, reserved manner that no cheerfulness of
hospitality can soften..
I remember of an accident of this kind which occurred last summer in my
office, while I was writing something scathing. A large map with an air
of profound perspiration about him, and a plaid flannel shirt, stepped
into the middle of the room, and breathed in the air that I was not
using. He said he would give me four minutes in which to retract, and
pulled out a watch by which to ascertain the exact time.
[Illustration: 0067]
I asked him if he would not allow me a moment or two to go over to the
telegraph office and to wire my parents of my awful death. He said I
could walk out of that door when I walked over his dead body. Then I
waited a long time, until he told me my time was up, and asked what
I was waiting for. I told him I was waiting for him to die, so that I
could walk over his dead body. How could I walk over a corpse until life
was extinct?
He stood and looked at me first in astonishment, afterward in pity.
Finally tears welled up in his eyes, and plowed their way down his brown
and grimy face. Then he said that I need not fear him. "You are safe,"
said he. "A youth who is so patient and so cheerful as you are--who
would wait for a healthy man to die so that you could meander over his
pulseless remnants, ought not to die a violent death. A soft-eyed seraph
like you, who is no more conversant with the ways of this world than
that, ought to be put in a glass vial of alcohol and preserved. I came
up here to kill you and throw you into the rain-water barrel, but now
that I know what a patient disposition you have, I shudder to think of
the crime I was about to commit."