In matters of “industrial discontent” it has always been a standing

order in the editorial offices of the Hearst newspapers to “take the

side of the strikers” without inquiry or delay. Until the great

publicist was bitten by political ambition and began to figure as a

crazy candidate for office not a word of warning or rebuke to murderous

mobs ever appeared in any column of his papers, except my own. A

typical instance of the falsification of news to serve a foul purpose

may be cited here. In Pennsylvania, a ferocious mob of foreign miners

armed with bludgeons marched upon the property of their employers,

to destroy it, incidentally chasing out of their houses all the

English-speaking residents along the way and clubbing all that they

could catch. Arriving at the “works,” they were confronted by a squad

of deputy marshals, and while engaged in murdering the sheriff, who

had stepped forward to read the riot act, were fired on and a couple

of dozen of them killed. Naturally, the deputy marshals were put on

trial for their lives. Mr. Hearst sent my good friend Julius Chambers

to report the court proceedings. Day after day he reported at great

length the testimony (translated) of the saints and angels who had

suffered the mischance “while peacefully parading on a public road.”

Then Mr. Chambers was ordered away and not a word of testimony for the

defence (all in English), ever appeared in the paper. Instances of

such fair-mindedness as this could be multiplied by the thousand, but

all, I charitably trust, have been recorded Elsewhere in a more notable

Book than mine.

Never just, Mr. Hearst is always generous. He is not swift to redress

a grievance of one of his employees against another, but he is likely

to give the complainant a cottage, a steam launch, or a roll of bank

notes, if that person happens to be the kind of man to accept it,

and he commonly is. As to discharging anybody for inefficiency or

dishonesty—no, indeed, not so long as there is a higher place for him.

His notion of removal is promotion.

He once really did dismiss a managing editor, but in a few months the

fellow was back in his old place. I ventured to express surprise. “Oh,

that’s all right,” Mr. Hearst explained. “I have a new understanding

with him. He is to steal only small sums hereafter; the large ones are

to come to me.”

In that incident we observe two dominant features in his character—his

indifference to money and his marvelous sense of humor. He who should

apprehend danger to public property from Mr. Hearst’s elevation to high

office would err. The money to which he is indifferent includes that

of others, and he smiles at his own expense.

If there is a capable working newspaper man in this country who has

not, _malgre lui_, a kindly feeling for Mr. Hearst, he needs the

light. I do not know how it is elsewhere, but in San Francisco and

New York Mr. Hearst’s habit of having the cleverest (not, alas the

most conscientious) obtainable men, no matter what he had to pay

them, advanced the salaries of all such men more than fifty per cent.

Possibly these have receded, and possibly the high average ability of

his men has receded too—I don’t know; but indubitably he did get the

brightest men.

Some of them, I grieve to say, were imperfectly appreciative of their

employer’s gentle sway. At one time on the _Examiner_ it was customary,

when a reporter had a disagreeable assignment, for him to go away for

a few days, then return and plead intoxication. That excused him. They

used to tell of one clever fellow in whose behalf this plea was entered

while he was still absent from duty. An hour afterward Mr. Hearst met

him and, seeing that he was cold sober, reproved him for deceit. On

the scamp’s assurance that he had honestly intended to be drunk, but

lacked the price, Mr. Hearst gave him enough money to re-establish his

character for veracity and passed on.

I fancy things have changed a bit now, and that Mr. Hearst has changed

with them. He is older and graver, is no longer immune to ambition,

and may have discovered that good-fellowship with his subordinates

and gratification of his lone humor are not profitable in business

and politics. Doubtless too, he has learned from observation of his

entourage of sycophants and self-seekers that generosity and gratitude

are virtues that have not a speaking acquaintance. It is worth

something to learn that, and it costs something.

With many amiable and alluring qualities, among which is, or used to

be, a personal modesty amounting to bashfulness, the man has not a

friend in the world. Nor does he merit one, for, either congenitally

or by induced perversity, he is inaccessible to the conception of an

unselfish attachment or a disinterested motive. Silent and smiling,

he moves among men, the loneliest man. Nobody but God loves him and

he knows it; and God’s love he values only in so far as he fancies

that it may promote his amusing ambition to darken the door of the

White House. As to that, I think that he would be about the kind of

President that the country—daft with democracy and sick with sin—is

beginning to deserve.

MORTALITY IN THE FOOT-HILLS[*]

A little bit of romance has just transpired to relieve the monotony of

our metropolitan life. Old Sam Choggins, whom the editor of this paper

has so often publicly thrashed, has returned from Mud Springs with a

young wife. He is said to be very fond of her, and the way he came to

get her was this:

Some time ago we courted her, but finding she was “on the make” we

threw off on her after shooting her brother. She vowed revenge and

promised to marry any man who would horse-whip us. This Sam agreed to

undertake, and she married him on that promise.

We shall call on Sam to-morrow with our new shotgun and present our

congratulations in the usual form.—_Hangtown “Gibbet.”_

• • • • •

The purposeless old party with a boiled shirt who has for some days

been loafing about the town peddling hymn-books at a merely nominal

price (a clear proof that he stole them) has been disposed of in a

cheap and satisfactory manner. His lode petered out about six o’clock

yesterday afternoon, our evening edition being delayed until that time

by request. The cause of his death, as nearly as could be ascertained

by a single physician—Dr. Duffer being too drunk to attend—was Whisky

Sam, who, it will be remembered, delivered a lecture some weeks ago,

entitled “Dan’l in the Lions’ Den; and How They’d a-Et Him If He’d Ever

Been Thar”—in which he overthrew revealed religion.

His course yesterday proves that he can act, as well as talk.—_Devil

Gully “Expositor.”_

• • • • •

There was considerable excitement in the street yesterday, owing to

the arrival of Bust-Head Dave, formerly of this place, who came over

from Pudding Springs. He was met at the hotel by Sheriff Knogg, who

leaves a large family. Dave walked down to the bridge, and it reminded

one of old times to see the people go away as he heaved in view, for

he had made a threat (first published in this paper) to clean out the

town. Before leaving the place Dave called at our office to settle for

a year’s subscription (invariably in advance) and was informed through

a chink in the logs, that he might leave his dust in the tin cup at the

well. Dave is looking much larger than at his last visit, just previous

to the funeral of Judge Dawson. He left for Injun Hill at five o’clock

amidst a good deal of shooting at rather long range. There will be an

election for Sheriff as soon as a stranger can be found who will accept

the honor.—_Yankee Flat “Advertiser.”_

• • • • •

It is to be hoped the people will turn out to-morrow, according to

advertisement in another column. The men deserve hanging, no end, but

at the same time they are human and entitled to some respect; and

we shall print the name of every adult male who does not grace the

occasion with his presence. We make this announcement simply because

there have been some indications of apathy; and any man who will stay

away when Bob Bolton and Sam Buxter are to be hanged is probably

either an accomplice or a relation. Old Blanket-Mouth Dick was not the

only blood relation these fellows had in this vicinity; and the fate

that befell him when they could not be found ought to be a warning to

the rest.

The bar is just in rear of the gibbet and will be run by a brother of

ours. Gentlemen who shrink from publicity will patronize that bar.—_San

Louis Jones “Gazette.”_

• • • • •

A painful accident occurred in Frog Gulch yesterday which has cast a

good deal of gloom over a hitherto joyous community. Dan Spigger—or, as

he was familiarly called, Murderer Dan—got drunk at his usual hour and,

as is his custom, took down his gun and started after the fellow who

went home with Dan’s girl the night before. He found him at breakfast

with his wife and children. After dispersing them he started out to

return, but, being weary, stumbled and broke his leg. Dr. Bill Croft

found him in that condition and, having no wagon at hand to convey

him to town, shot him to put him out of his misery. His loss is a

Democratic gain. He seldom disagreed with any but Democrats and would

have materially reduced the vote of that party had he not been so

untimely cut off.—_Jackass Gap “Bulletin.”_

• • • • •

The dance-house at the corner of Moll Duncan street and Fish-Trap

avenue has been broken up. Our friend the editor of _The Jamboree_

succeeded in getting his cock-eyed sister in there as a beer-slinger

and the hurdy-gurdy girls all swore they would not stand her society.

They got up and got. The light fantastic toe is not tripped there any

more, except when the _Jamboree_ man sneaks in and dances a jig for his

morning pizen.—_Murderburg “Herald.”_

• • • • •

The superintendent of the Mag Davis mine requests us to state that the

custom of pitching Chinamen and Injins down the shaft will have to be

stopped, as he has resumed work in the mine. The old well back of Jo

Bowman’s is just as good, and more centrally located.—_New Jerusalem

“Courier.”_

• • • • •

There is a fellow in town who claims to be the man that killed Sheriff

White some months ago. We consider him an impostor seeking admission

into society above his level, and hope people will stop inviting him

to their houses.—_Nigger Hill “Patriot.”_

• • • • •

A stranger wearing a stovepipe hat arrived in town yesterday, putting

up at the Nugget House. The boys are having a good time with that hat

this morning. The funeral will take place at two o’clock.—_Spanish Camp

“Flag.”_

• • • • •

The scoundrel who upset our office last month will be hung to-morrow

and no paper will be issued the next day.—“_Sierra Firecracker._”

• • • • •

The old gray-headed party who lost his life last Friday at the jeweled

hands of our wife deserves more than a passing notice at ours. He came

to this city last summer and started a weekly Methodist prayer-meeting,

but being warned by the police, who was formerly a Presbyterian, gave

up the swindle. He afterward undertook to introduce Bibles and, it is

said, on one occasion attempted to preach. This was a little too much

and at our suggestion he was tarred and feathered.

For a time this treatment seemed to work a reform, but the heart of a

Methodist is above all things deceitful and desperately wicked: he was

soon after caught in the very act of presenting a hymnbook to old Ben

Spoffer’s youngest daughter, Ragged Moll. The vigilance committee _pro

tem._ waited on him, when he was decently shot and left for dead, as

was recorded in this paper, with an obituary notice for which we have

never received a cent. Last Friday, however, he was discovered sneaking

into the potato patch connected with this paper and our wife, God bless

her! got an axe and finished him then and there.

His name was John Bucknor and it is reported (we do not know with how

much truth) that at one time there was an improper intimacy between him

and the lady who despatched him. If so, we pity Sal.—_Coyote “Trapper.”_

• • • • •

Our readers may have noticed in yesterday’s issue an editorial article

in which we charged Judge Black with having murdered his father,

beaten his wife and stolen seven mules from Jo Gorman. The facts are

substantially as stated, but somewhat different. The killing was done

by a Dutchman named Moriarty and the bruises that we happened to see

on the face of the Judge’s wife were caused by a fall, she being,

doubtless, drunk at the time. The mules had only strayed into the

mountains and have returned all right.

We consider the Judge’s anger at so trifling an error very ridiculous

and insulting and if he comes to town he will not come again. An

independent press is not to be muzzled by any absurd old duffer with

a crooked nose and a sister who is considerably more mother than

wife. Not so long as we have our usual success in thinning out the

judiciary.—_Lone Tree “Sockdologer.”_

• • • • •

Yesterday as Job Wheeler was returning from a clean-up at the

Buttermilk Flume he stopped at Hell Tunnel to have a chat with the

boys. John Tooley took a fancy to Job’s watch and asked for it. Being

refused, he slipped away, and going to Job’s shanty, killed his three

half-breed children and a valuable pig. This is the third time John

has played some scurvy trick, and it is about time the superintendent

discharged him. There is entirely too much of this practical joking

amongst the boys. It will lead to trouble yet.—_Nugget Hill “Pickaxe of

Freedom.”_

• • • • •

The stranger from Frisco, with the clawhammer coat, who put up at the

Gage House last Thursday, and was looking for a chance to invest,

was robbed of three hundred ounces of clean dust. We know who did it,

but don’t be frightened, John Lowry; we’ll never tell, though we are

awful hard up, owing to our subscribers going back on us.—_Choketown

“Rocker.”_

• • • • •

The railroad from this city northwest will be commenced as soon as the

citizens get tired of admonishing the Chinamen brought up to do the

work, which will probably be within three or four weeks. The carcasses

are accumulating about town and begin to be unpleasant.—_Gravel Hill

“Thunderbolt.”_

• • • • •

The man who was shot last week at the Gulch will be buried next

Thursday. He is not dead yet, but his physician wishes to visit a

mother-in-law at Lard Springs and is therefore very anxious to get the

case off his hands. The undertaker describes the patient as the longest

cuss in that section.—_Santa Peggy “Times.”_

• • • • •

There is some dispute about land titles at Little Bilk Bar. About

half a dozen cases were temporarily decided on Wednesday, but it is

supposed the widows will renew the litigation. The only proper way to

prevent these vexatious lawsuits is to hang the judge of the county

court.—_Cow-County “Outcropper.”_

[*] Under another title, these paragraphs may be found in a foolish

book called _The Fiend’s Delight_, published in London in 1872

by John Camden Hotten. They had appeared in the San Francisco

_Newsletter_ two or three years before—an illuminating contribution

to a current medical discussion of an uncommonly high death-rate

in certain mining towns. Their pedigree is given here by way of

assisting that original humorist, Mr. Charles B. Lewis, in any

further explanations that he may make as to how and when he was

inspired by Heaven to write his famous _Arizona Kicker_.

THE A. L. C. B.

A society of which I am the proud and happy founder is the American

League for the Circumvention of Bores. With a view to enlisting the

reader’s interest and favor and obtaining his initiation fee, I beg

leave to expound the ends and methods of the order.

The League purposes to work within the law: Bores can be circumvented

by killing; which may be called the circumvention direct; but for

every Bore that is killed arises a swarm of Bores (reporters, lawyers,

jurors, etc.) whom one is unable to kill. The League plan is humane,

simple, ingenious and effective. It leaves the Bore alive, to suffer

the lasting torments of his own esteem.

The American League for the Circumvention of Bores has the customary

machinery of grips, pass-words, signs, a goat, solemn ceremonials and

mystic hoodooing; but for practical use it employs only the Signal of

Eminent Distress, to preservation of the secret whereof members are

bound by the most horrible oath known to the annals of juration. It is

a law that any member duly convicted in the secret tribunals of the

League of failing promptly to respond to the Signal of Eminent Distress

shall suffer evisceration through the nose.

The plan works this way: I am, say, on a ferry-boat. Carelessly

glancing about, I see—yes, it must have been—ah! again: the Signal of

Eminent Distress! A Brother of the League is _in articulo mortis_—the

demon hath him—the beak of the Bore is crimson in his heart! I go to

the rescue, choosing, according to my judgment and tact, one of the Ten

Thousand Forms of Benign Relief which I have memorized from the Ritual.

“Ah, my dear fellow,” I perhaps say to the victim, whom I may never

have seen before, “I have been looking all over the boat for you.

I must have a word with you on a most important matter if your

friend”—looking at the baffled Bore who has been talking into him—“will

have the goodness to excuse you.”

Possibly, though, I say to the signaling victim: “Sir, pardon me, but

is not your name—?”

“Jonesmith,” he replies, coldly; “may I ask—?”

“Ah, yes; I hope you will not think me intrusive, but a gentleman on

the lower deck, who says he is your uncle, has fallen and broken his

neck.”

As Mr. Jonesmith with a grateful look moves off, the Bore, full of

solicitude, starts to follow for assistance and condolence. I lay my

hand on his arm. “Pardon, sir; the physician prescribes absolute quiet:

the splendor, charm and vivacity of your conversation would unduly

excite the patient.”

Before the wretch can round-up his faculties the Brother in Distress

has escaped and I am walking away with the 368th Aspect of Superb

Unconcern, as laid down in the Ritual.

The League has been in existence in New York city for about six months.

There is a younger branch at Hohokus, and another is forming at Podunk.

I am the Supreme Imperial Inimitable, though every member has high rank

and office. Applications for membership must be made personally to the

Grand Dictatorial Caboodle, which will judge whether the applicant is

himself a Bore.

TWO CONVERSATIONS

I

CANDID PUBLISHER.—Sir, I am proud to meet you. Your book is admirable;

it is exquisitely touching and beautiful.

REASONABLE AUTHOR.—Your commendation is most pleasing to me. I was at

no time in doubt of your favorable action in the matter.

C. P.—You did not hear me out. Publication of a book entails a

considerable expense.

R. A.—Naturally.

C. P.—The money does not always come back.

R. A.—I have been so informed. Publishers sometimes accept work that is

very bad literature.

C. P.—Yes, we try to.

R. A.—Try to? You cannot mean that you prefer such work.

C. P.—We must publish what will sell. Do you read the most popular

books of the year—the “best-selling” novels?—nearly all “best sellers”

are novels.

R. A.—God forbid! I sometimes look at them.

C. P.—Do you ever find _one_ that has any literary merit?

R. A.—Certainly not. I did not expect my book to be popular, but hoped

that it might have a steady and perhaps increasing sale and eventually

become famous. You sometimes publish new editions of the great works in

our language—“the English classics.” Do you lose money by them?

C. P.—Not usually. They have had the advantage of generations of

advertising by scholars and by critics whose words had weight in their

time and have in ours. If your excellent book finds a publisher pretty

soon and is kept going until the year 2100, we shall be glad to put it

on our list. You see it is very simple: you have only to conform to the

conditions of success.

R. A.—I see. But are these the only conditions? Some great work

succeeds in its author’s time—that of Tennyson, Thackeray, Dickens,

Carlyle, and so forth, in England; and in America that of—m, er, huh.

C. P.—Is it surely great work? The ink is hardly dry. The literary

fashions determining its form and substance are still with us.

Posterity will have to pass judgment upon it, which posterity will

indubitably do without reference to our view of the matter. Then, if

you and I happen to be in communication with this vale of tears we

shall know if these noted authors were mining the great mother-lode of

human interest, or, occasionally touching some of its dips, spurs and

angles, taking out barren rock. It looks to us like a rich enough ore,

but it is a long journey to where there is an assaying-plant capable of

dealing with that particular product. When it is “heard from” we shall

not be here. Those who mined it are gone already.

R. A.—Then there can be no valuable contemporary criticism?

C. P.—None that any one can know to be valuable.

R. A.—And no man can live long enough to know if he is a good writer?

C. P.—The trade of writing has that disadvantage.

R. A.—We are getting a long way from business. Am I to understand that

you reject my book because, as you say, “it is exquisitely touching and

beautiful”?

C. P.—You outline the painful situation with accuracy.

R. A.—Well, I’ll be damned!

C. P.—Sure!—if you find a sentimentalist who will publish your book. He

will do the damning.

II

EDITOR.—Glad to see you, sir. Take a chair.

VISITOR.—I am the proprietor of _The Prosperous Monthly_.

ED.—Take two chairs.

VIS.—I called to congratulate you on the extraordinary success of _The

Waste Basket_. I should not have thought it possible for you to break

into our field and play this game as well as we. And with so fantastic

a title!

ED.—For my success I am greatly indebted to yourself.

VIS.—Not if I know it: we have fought you, tooth and nail.

ED.—Oh, that is all right; if it had been expedient we should have

fought back. Our prosperity depended on yours.

VIS.—Heaven has withheld from me the intelligence to understand.

ED.—Have any of the contents of this magazine ever seemed familiar to

you?

VIS.—I am not much of a reader; my editor has fancied that some of your

articles lacked originality, but has confessed that he could not quite

identify their authors.

ED.—Just so; I accept nothing for my magazine that has not been first

submitted to yours. If it has not been when offered, I require that to

be done.

VIS.—That is monstrous nice of you. Such knightly courtesy to a senior

competitor is most unusual. I thank you—come and dine with me to-morrow

at seven (_handing card_).

ED.—With pleasure. Good day.

VIS.—Good day. (_Exit Visitor._)

ED. (_solus_).—If he thinks it out, I shall miss a dinner.

A STORY AT THE CLUB

“Do you believe that?” said Dr. Dutton, passing a newspaper across the

table to Will Brady and taking needless pains to point out “that” with

his thumb. Brady read the discredited paragraph. It was as follows:

Mr. John Doane, of Peequeegan, Maine, has received seven hundred

and fifty thousand dollars from the estate of an old man whom he

protected from the abuse of a rowdy fifteen years ago, and whom

he never afterward saw nor heard from. In the will the old man

apologized for the smallness of the bequest, explaining that it was

all that he had.

“Believe it?” said Brady; “I know it to be true. I was myself the—”

He paused to think.

“Now, how the devil,” said Dutton, “can you ring yourself into _that_

story? You are not John Doane, and you certainly are not the late old

man.”

“I was about to say,” resumed Brady, composedly, “that I was myself the

legatee in a somewhat similar case. In the year—”

“Waiter,” said Dutton, “bring me twelve cigars, three bottles of

champagne and, at daylight, a cup of powerful coffee. When the fellows

come in from the theater ask them not to come into this room—say

there’s a man in here who is engaged in being murdered.”

“In the year 1892,” Mr. Brady went on to say, “I was living in Peoria,

Illinois. One night while walking along the railroad track just outside

of town I saw a man making the most violent exertions to release

himself from the ‘frog’ of a switch, into which he had incautiously

wedged the heel of his shoe. He was steaming with perspiration and

the look of agony on his face was worth a long walk to see. You

have probably seen such a look on the countenance of many a patient

undergoing the operation of receiving your bill. The express train was

due in two minutes, and we had not so much as a match to signal it

with—the night was tar-dark.”

“The look of agony, I suppose, shone by its own inherent light.”

“The man was facing away from the approaching train—the thunder of

which was now audible between his groans and cries. Just in the nick

of time I stepped up to him and introducing myself begged pardon for

the intrusion and suggested that he unlace his shoe and remove his foot

from it, which he did. When the train had passed he thanked me and

handed me his card. I have carried it with me ever since—here it is.”

Taking out a bit of pasteboard he handed it across the table without

looking at it. It read:

DEARIE,—I could not come: I was watched. To-morrow—same time, at

the _other_ place. OOPSIE.

The Doctor read the card and quietly handed it back. The story

proceeded:

“A moment later the man had disappeared, but in a week or two I

received a letter from him, dated at Chicago. He said he owed his life

to me and should devote it to my service. Being childless, friendless

and heretofore without an aim or ambition, he should pass the rest of

his days in acquiring wealth, in order to testify his gratitude. It

would be a labor of love to trace me wherever I might wander—I need not

apprise him of my address, nor in any way bother myself about him. If I

survived him I would be a very rich man.

“Well, sir, you may believe it or not, but if there is any name which

deserves to be held by me in high honor for truth and simple good

faith it is the name of—”

“Oopsie.”

Mr. Brady was visibly affected. For a moment he was fitly comparable to

nothing warmer and livelier than a snow bank under the bleak stars of a

polar midnight. The Doctor toyed absently with the ash-holder. It was a

supreme crisis. It passed.

“That man died in 1901 and left me, by will, an estate valued at more

than nine hundred thousand dollars. The will was properly probated and

never contested.”

“But, my dear fellow,” said Dutton, taking at last a genuine interest

in the narrative, “you never told us—nobody has ever heard of this, and

you certainly do not pass for a very rich man. Did you really get the

property?”

“Alas, no,” said Brady, with a solemn shake of the head, as he rose

from the table and glanced at his watch. “It is true, just as I have

told you—on my honor: the man left me that property and all was square,

regular and legal, but I did not get a cent. The fact is, I died

first.”

THE WIZARD OF BUMBASSA

Mr. George Westinghouse, the air-brake man, did a cruel and needless

thing in going out of his way to try to destroy humanity’s hope of

being shot along the ground at a speed of one hundred miles an hour.

There is no trouble, it appears, in building locomotives able to

snatch a small village of us through space at the required speed;

the difficulty lies in making, with sufficient promptness, those

unschedulary stops necessitated by open switches, missing bridges,

and various obstacles that industrial discontent is wont to grace

the track withal. Even on a straight line—what the civil engineers

find a pleasure in calling a tangent—the prosperous industrian at

the throttle-valve cannot reasonably be expected to discern these

hindrances at a greater distance than one thousand feet; and Mr.

Westinghouse sadly confessed that in that distance his most effective

appliance could not do more than reduce the rate from one hundred miles

an hour to fifty—an obviously inadequate reduction. He held out no hope

of being able to evolve from his inner consciousness either a brake of

superior effectiveness or a pair of spectacles that would enable the

engine driver to discover a more distant danger on a tangent, or to see

round a curve.

All this begets an intelligent dejection. If we must renounce our

golden dream of cannonading ourselves from place to place with a

celerity suitable to our rank in the world’s _fauna_—comprising the

shark, the hummingbird, the hornet and the jackass rabbit—civilization

is indeed a failure. But it is forbidden to the wicked pessimist to

rejoice, for there is a greater than Mr. Westinghouse and he has

demonstrated his ability to bring to a dead stop within its own length

any railway train, however short and whatever its rate of speed. It

were unwise though, to indulge too high a hope in this matter, even if

the gloomy vaticinations of the Westinghouse person are fallacious.

Approaching an evidence of social unrest at a speed of one and

two-thirds mile a minute on a down grade, even in a train equipped by

a greater than Mr. Westinghouse, may not be an altogether pleasing

performance.

This possibility can be best illustrated by recalling to the reader’s

memory the history of the Ghargaroo and Gallywest Railway in Bumbassa.

As is well known, the trains on that road attained a speed that had not

theretofore been dreamed of except by the illustrious projector of the

road. But the King of Bumbassa was not content: with an indifference

to the laws of dynamics which in the retrospect seems almost imperial,

he insisted upon instantaneous stoppage. To the royal demand the

clever and prudent gentleman who had devised and carried out the

enterprise responded with an invention which he assured his Majesty

would accomplish the desired end. A trial was made in the sovereign’s

presence, the coaches being loaded with his chief officers of state

and other courtiers, and it was eminently successful. The train, going

at a speed of ninety miles an hour, was brought to a dead stop within

the length of the rhinoceros-catcher and directly in front of the blue

cotton umbrella beneath which his Majesty sat to observe the result of

the test. The passengers, unfortunately, did not stop so promptly, and

were afterward scraped off the woodwork at the forward ends of the cars

and decently interred. The train-hands had all escaped by the ingenious

plan of absenting themselves from the proceedings, with the exception

of the engineer, who had thoughtfully been selected for the occasion

from among the relatives of the projector’s wife, and instructed how

to shut off the steam and apply the brake. When hosed off the several

parts of the engine he was found to have incurred a serious dispersal

of the viscera.

The King’s delight at the success of the experiment was somewhat

mitigated by the reflection that if the train had been freighted with

_bona fide_ travelers instead of dignitaries whom he could replace by

appointment the military resources of the state would have suffered a

considerable loss; so he commanded the projector to invent a method of

stopping the passengers and the trains simultaneously. This, after much

experiment, was done by fixing the passengers to the seats by clamps

extending across the abdomen and chest; but no provision being made for

the head, a general decapitation ensued at each stop; and people who

valued their heads preferred thereafter to travel afoot or ostrichback,

as before. It was found, moreover, that, as arrested motion is

converted into heat, the royal requirement frequently resulted in

igniting and consuming the trains—which was expensive.

These various hard conditions of railroading in Bumbassa eventually

subdued the spirits of the stockholders, drove the projector to drink

and led at last to withdrawal of the concession—whereby one of the most

promising projects for civilizing the Dark Continent was, in the words

of the Ghargaroo _Palladium_ “knocked perfectly cold.”

I have thought it well to recall this melancholy incident

here for its general usefulness in pointing a moral, and for

its particular application to the fascinating enterprise of a

one-hundred-miles-an-hour electric road from New York to Chicago—a road

whose trains, intending passengers are assured, will be under absolute

control of the engineers and “can be stopped at a moment’s notice.”

If I have said anything to discourage the enterprise I am sorry, but

really it is not easy to understand why anybody should wish to go from

New York to Chicago.

THE FUTURE HISTORIAN

I—THE DISPERSAL

So sombre a phenomenon as the effacement of an ancient and brilliant

civilization within the lifetime of a single generation is,

fortunately, known to have occurred only once in the history of the

world. The catastrophe is not only unique in history, but all the more

notable for having befallen, not a single state overrun by powerful

barbarians, but a half of the world; and for having been effected by

a seemingly trivial agency that sprang from the civilization itself.

Indeed, it was the work of one man.

Hiram Perry (or Percy) Maximus was born in the latter part of the

nineteenth century of “the Christian Era,” in Podunk, the capital of

America. Little is known of his ancestry, although Dumbleshaw affirms

on evidence not cited by him that he came of a family of pirates that

infested the waters of Lake Erie (now the desert of Gobol) as early as

“1813”—whenever that may have been.

The precise nature of Hiram Perry’s invention, with its successive

improvements, is not known—probably could not now be understood. It

was called “the silent firearm”—so much we learn from fragmentary

chronicles of the period; also that it was of so small size that it

could be put into the “pocket.” (In his _Dictionary of Antiquities_ the

learned Pantin-Gwocx defines “pocket” as, first, “the main temple of

the American deity;” second, “a small receptacle worn on the person.”

The latter definition is the one, doubtless, that concerns us if

the two things are not the same.) Regarding the work of “the silent

firearm” we have light in abundance. Indeed, the entire history of the

brief but bloody period between its invention and the extinction of the

Christian civilization is an unbroken record of its fateful employment.

Of course the immense armies of the time were at once supplied with

the new weapon, with results that none had foreseen. Soldiers were

thenceforth as formidable to their officers as to their enemies. It was

no longer possible to maintain discipline, for no officer dared offend,

by punishment or reprimand, one who could fatally retaliate as secretly

and securely, in the repose of camp as in the tumult of battle. In

civic affairs the deadly device was malignly active. Statesmen in

disfavor (and all were hateful to men of contrary politics) fell dead

in the forum by means invisible and inaudible. Anarchy, discarding her

noisy and imperfectly effective methods, gladly embraced the new and

safe one.

In other walks of life matters were no better. Armed with the sinister

power of life and death, any evil-minded person (and most of the

ancient Caucasians appear to have been evil-minded) could gratify a

private revenge or wanton malevolence by slaying whom he would, and

nothing cried aloud the lamentable deed.

So horrible was the mortality, so futile all preventive legislation,

that society was stricken with a universal panic. Cities were plundered

and abandoned; villages without villagers fell to decay; homes were

given up to bats and owls, and farms became jungles infested with wild

beasts. The people fled to the mountains, the forests, the marshes,

concealing themselves from one another in caves and thickets, and

dying from privation and exposure and diseases more dreadful than the

perils from which they had fled. When every human being distrusted and

feared every other human being solitude was esteemed the only good; and

solitude spells death. In one generation Americans and Europeans had

slunk back into the night of barbarism.

II—RISE AND FALL OF THE AEROPLANE

The craze for flying appears to have culminated in the year 369 Before

Smith. In that year the aëroplane (a word of unknown derivation) was

almost the sole means of travel. These flying-machines were so simple

and cheap that one who had not a spare half-hour in which to make one

could afford to purchase. The price for a one-man machine was about

two dollars—one-tenth of a gooble. Double-seated ones were of course

a little more costly. No other kinds were allowed by law, for, as was

quaintly explained by a chronicle of the period, “a man has a right to

break his own neck, and that of his wife, but not those of his children

and friends.” It had been learned by experiment that for transportation

of goods and for use in war the aëroplane was without utility. (Of

balloons, dirigible and indirigible, we hear nothing after 348 B.

S; the price of gas, controlled by a single corporation, made them

impossible.)

From extant fragments of Jobblecopper’s _History of Invention_ it

appears that in America alone there were at one time no fewer than ten

million aëroplanes in use. In and about the great cities the air was so

crowded with them and collisions resulting in falls were so frequent

that prudent persons neither ventured to use them nor dared to go out

of cover. As a poet of the time expressed it:

With falling fools so thick the sky is filled

That wise men walk abroad but to be killed.

Small comfort that the fool, too, dies in falling,

For he’d have starved betimes in any calling.

The earth is spattered red with their remains:

Blood, flesh, bone, gristle—everything but brains.

The reaction from this disagreeable state of affairs seems to have been

brought about by a combination of causes.

First, the fierce animosities engendered by the perils to pedestrians

and “motorists”—a word of disputed meaning. So savage did this

hostility become that firing at aëroplanes in flight, with the newly

invented silent rifle, grew to the character of a national custom.

Dimshouck has found authority for the statement that in a single

day thirty-one aëronauts fell from the heavens into the streets of

Nebraska, the capital of Chocago, victims of popular disfavor; and a

writer of that time relates, not altogether lucidly, the finding in a

park in Ohio of the bodies of “the Wright brothers, each pierced with

bullets from hip to shoulder, the ears cut off, and without other marks

of identification.”

Second in importance of these adverse conditions was the natural

disposition of the ancients to tire of whatever had engaged their

enthusiasm—the fickleness that had led to abandonment of the bicycle,

of republican government, of baseball, and of respect for women. In the

instance of the aëroplane this reaction was probably somewhat hastened

by the rifle practice mentioned.

Third, invention of the electric leg. As a means of going from place to

place the ancients had from the earliest ages of history relied largely

on the wheel. Just how they applied it, not in stationary machinery,

as we do ourselves, but as an aid to locomotion, we cannot now hope

to know, for all the literature of the subject has perished; but it

was evidently a crude and clumsy device, giving a speed of less than

two hundred miles (four and a half sikliks) an hour, even on roadways

specially provided with rails for its rapid revolution. We know, too,

that wheels produced an intolerable jolting of the body, whereby

many died of a disease known as “therapeutics.” Indeed, a certain

class of persons who probably traveled faster than others came to be

called “rough riders,” and for their sufferings were compensated by

appointment to the most lucrative offices in the gift of the sovereign.

Small wonder that the men of that day hailed the aëroplane with

intemperate enthusiasm and used it with insupportable immoderation!

But when the younger Eddy invented that supreme space-conquering

device, the electric leg, and within six months perfected it to

virtually what it is to-day, the necessity for flight no longer

existed. The aëroplane, ending its brief and bloody reign a discredited

and discarded toy, was “sent to the scrap-heap,” as one of our

brightest and most original modern wits has expressed it. The wheel

followed it into oblivion, whither the horse had preceded it, and

Civilization lifted her virgin fires as a dawn in Eden, and like

Cytherea leading her moonrise troop of nymphs and graces, literally

legged it o’er the land!

III—AN ANCIENT HUNTER

In the nineteenth century of what, in honor of Christopher Columbum,

a mythical hero, the ancients called the “Christian era,” Africa was

an unknown land of deserts, jungles, fierce wild beasts, and degraded

savages. It is believed that no white man had ever penetrated it to a

distance of one league from the coast. All the literature of that time

relating to African exploration, conquest, and settlement is now known

to be purely imaginative—what the ancients admired as “fiction” and we

punish as felony.

Authentic African history begins in the early years of the twentieth

century of the “era” mentioned, and its most stupendous events are

the first recorded, the record being made, chiefly, by the hand

that wrought the work—that of Tudor Rosenfelt, the most illustrious

figure of antiquity. Of this astonishing man’s parentage and early

life nothing is certainly known: legend is loquacious, but history is

silent. There are traditions affirming his connection with a disastrous

explosion at Bronco, a city of the Chinese province of Wyo Ming, his

subjugation of the usurper Tammano in the American city of N’yorx (now

known to have had no existence outside the imagination of the poets)

and his conquest of the island of Cubebs; but from all this bushel of

fable we get no grain of authenticated fact. The tales appear to be

merely hero-myths, such as belong to the legendary age of every people

of the ancient world except the Greeks and Romans. Further than that

he was an American Indian nothing can be positively affirmed of Tudor

Rosenfelt before the year “1909” of the “Christian [Columbian] era.”

In that year we glimpse him disembarking from two ships on the African

coast near Bumbassa, and, with one foot in the sea and the other on dry

land, swearing through clenched teeth that other forms of life than Man

shall be no more. He then strides, unarmed and unattended, into the

jungle, and is lost to view for ten years!

Legend and myth now reassert their ancient reign. In that memorable

decade, as we know from the ancient author of “Who’s Whoest in Africa,”

the most incredible tales were told and believed by those who,

knowing the man and his mission, suffered insupportable alternations

of hope and despair. It was said that the Dark Continent into which

he had vanished was frequently shaken from coast to coast as by the

trampling and wrestling of titanic energies in combat and the fall of

colossal bulks on the yielding crust of the earth; that mariners in

adjacent waters heard recurrent growls and roars of rage and shouts

of triumph—an enormous uproar that smote their ships like a gale from

the land and swept them affrighted out to sea; that so loud were

these terrible sounds as to be simultaneously audible in the Indian

and Atlantic oceans, as was proved by comparing the logs of vessels

arriving from both seas at the port of Berlin. As is quaintly related

in one of these marine diaries, “The noise was so strenuous that our

ears was nigh to busting with the wolume of the sound.” Through all

this monstrous opulence of the primitive rhetorical figure known as the

Lie we easily discern a nucleus of truth: something uncommon was going

on in Africa.

At the close of the memorable decade (_circa_ “1919”) authentic history

again appears in the fragmentary work of Antrolius: Rosenfelt walks

out of the jungle at Mbongwa on the side of the continent opposite

Bumbassa. He is now attended by a caravan of twenty thousand camels

and ten thousand native porters, all bearing trophies of the chase.

A complete list of these would require more pages than Homer Wheeler

Wilcox’s catalogue of ships, but among them were heads of elephants

with antlers attached; pelts of the checkered lion and the spiny

hippopotentot, respectively the most ferocious and the most venomous

of their species; a skeleton of the missing lynx (_Pithecanthropos

erectus compilatus_); entire bodies of pterodactyls and broncosauruses;

a slithy tove mounted on a fine specimen of the weeping wanderoo; the

downy electrical whacknasty (_Ananias flabbergastor_); the carnivorous

mastodon; ten specimens of the skinless tiger (_Felis decorticata_);

a saber-toothed python, whose bite produced the weeping sickness;

three ribnosed gazzadoodles; a pair of blood-sweating bandicoots; a

night-blooming jeewhillikins; three and a half varieties of the crested

skynoceros; a purring crocodile, or buzz-saurian; two Stymphalian

linnets; a skeleton of the three footed swammigolsis—afterwards

catalogued at the Podunk Museum of Defective Types as _Talpa unopede

noninvento_; a hydra from Lerna; the ring-tail mollycoddle and the

fawning polecat (_Civis nondesiderabilis_).

These terrible monsters, which from the dawning of time had ravaged

all Africa, baffling every attempt at exploration and settlement,

the Exterminator, as he came to be called, had strangled or captured

with his bare hands; and the few remaining were so cowed that they

gave milk. Indeed, such was their terror of his red right arm that

all forsook their evil ways, offered themselves as beasts of burden

to the whites that came afterward, and in domestication and servitude

sought the security that he denied to their ferocity and power. Within

a single generation prosperous colonies of Caucasians sprang up all

along the coasts, and the silk hat and pink shirt, immemorial pioneers

and promoters of civilization, penetrated the remotest fastnesses,

spreading peace and plenty o’er a smiling land!

The later history of this remarkable man is clouded in obscurity.

Much of his own account of his exploits, curiously intertangled with

those of an earlier hero named Hercules, is extant, but it closes

with his re-embarkation for America. Some hold that on returning to

his native land he was assailed with opprobrium, loaded with chains,

and cast into Chicago; others contend that he was enriched by gifts

from the sovereigns of the world, received with acclamation by his

grateful countrymen, and even mentioned for the presidency to succeed

Samuel Gompers—an honor that he modestly declined on the ground of

inexperience and unfitness. Whatever may be the truth of these matters,

he doubtless did not long suffer affliction nor enjoy prosperity, for

in the great catastrophe of the year 254 B. S. the entire continent of

North America and the contiguous island of Omaha were swallowed up by

the sea. Fortunately his narrative is preserved in the Royal Library of

Timbuktu, in which capital of civilization stands his colossal statue

of ivory and gold. In the shadow of that renowned memorial I write this

imperfect tribute to his worth.

OBJECTIVE IDEAS

We all remember that the sound of a trumpet has been described as

scarlet. The fact that we do remember it is evidence that the incident

of a physical sensation masquerading in a garment appropriate to the

guest of another sense than the one entertaining it is a general,

not an individual, experience. Not, of course, that a trumpet-call

impresses us all with a sense of color, but the odd description would

long ago have been forgotten had not each mind recognized it as the

statement of a fact belonging to a class of facts of which itself has

had knowledge. For myself, I never hear good music without wishing

to paint it—which I should certainly do with divine success if I

understood music and could paint. The hackneyed and tiresome fashion

of calling certain pictures “symphonies” in this or that color has

a basis of reason—which will somewhat discredit it in the esteem of

those whom it has enslaved. I never hear a man talking of “symphonies”

in gray, green, pepper-and-salt, crushed banana, ashes-of-heretic or

toper’s-nose without thinking with satisfaction of the time when he

will himself be a symphony in flame-color, lighting up the landscape

of the underworld like a flamingo in the dun expanse of a marsh in the

gloaming.

I have in mind a notable instance of a sensation taking on three

dimensions—one for which I am not indebted, probably, to the courtesy

of some forgotten experience producing an association of ideas. It

will be conceded that it is at least unlikely that one should ever

enjoy simultaneously the double gratification of eating a pine-apple

and seeing a man hanged; such felicity is reserved, I fancy, for

creatures more meritorious than poor sinful human beings. Nevertheless,

I never taste pine-apple without a lively sense of a man with his

head in a black bag, depending from his beam. It is not that I am at

the same time conscious of the fruit and of that solemn spectacle; it

simply seems to me that a man hanging is the taste of that fruit. It

is needless to add that when thinking of those unworthy persons, my

enemies, I derive a holy delight from consuming generous slices of

pine-apple.

There is a class of mental phenomena which, so far as my knowledge

goes, has never been “spread upon the record.” Possibly they are

peculiar to my own imperfect understanding, and a saner consciousness

is innocent of them. If so it will gratify my pride of monopoly to

admit the public to a view of my intellectual chattels. The mental

process of enumeration is with me a gliding upward in various

directions from 1 to 100; not along a column of successive figures,

like a cat scampering up a staircase, but along a smooth, pale-bluish,

angular streak, with the hither-and-yon motion of a soaring snipe.

From 1 to 10 the line runs upward, and to the right at an angle with

the horizon of about sixty degrees. There it turns sharply back to the

left and the grade to 20 is nearly flat. Thence to 30 the ascent is

vertical. From 30 to 50 there is an ascent of 10 degrees to the right

and slightly away from me. The course to 60 is to the left again, the

angle, say 10 degrees. From 60 to 90 there is no break, the course,

too, is almost level and directly away; thence to 100 nearly vertical.

It will be observed that the angles are all at 10 and its multiples,

but there is no angle at 40, none at 70, nor at 80. I may explain that

the interval between 10 and 20 is greatly longer than it ought to be,

and I venture to protest against the exceptional and unwarrantable

brevity of that between 90 and 100.

Every time I count I am compelled to ascend some part of this

reasonless and ridiculous Jacob’s-ladder, with a “hitchety, hatchety,

up I go” movement, like Jack mounting his bean-stalk; and it is

ludicrously true that I feel a sense of relief on arriving at the more

nearly level stages, and on them am conscious of an augmented speed.

I can count from 60 to 70 twice as quickly as I can from 90 to 100.

Investigation and comparison of such conceptions as these can but

result in unspeakable advancement of knowledge. If any gentleman has

similar ones and a little leisure for their discussion I hope he will

consent to meet me in Heaven.

MY CREDENTIALS

My death occurred on the 17th day of June, 1879—I shall never forget

it. The day had been uncommonly hot, and the doctor kept telling me

that unless it grew cooler he would hardly be able to pull me through.

He said he was willing to do his best and prolong my life to the latest

possible moment if I wished him to, but in any case I should have to

die in a few days. I directed him to keep on prolonging, but the heat

grew greater and finally overcame him, and I died. That is to say,

while he was absent at an adjacent saloon after a sherry cobbler one

of my “bad spells” came on and I fell a victim to inattention. Things

turned out exactly as medical science had foretold.

The funeral was largely attended and a society reporter was good enough

to describe it as an “enjoyable occasion.” I had been a prominent

member of one hundred and fifty societies, including the Sovereigns

of Glory, the Confederated Idiots, Knights and Ladies of Indigence,

Gorgeous Obsequies Guarantee Fraternity, Protective League of Adult

Orphans, Ancient and Honorable Order of Divorced Men, Society for

Converting Lawyers to Christianity, Murderers’ Mutual Resentment

Association, League of Persons Having Moles on Their Necks, Brotherhood

of Grand Flashing Inaccessibles, Mutual Pall Bearers, and Floral

Tribute Consolation Guard. All these societies, and many more, were

represented at my funeral, some in “regalia.” I was buried under more

auspices than you could count. Soon after, I was ushered into the Other

World.

It is not like what you have been told, but I am forbidden to say what

it is like. Suffice it that its inhabitants know all that goes on in

the world we have left. Imagine, then, the delight with which I read

in all the daily papers the various “resolutions of respect” adopted

by the societies of which I had been a member. The Sovereigns of Glory

said:

_Whereas_, Providence has found a pleasure in removing from among

us His Majesty, Peter Wodel Mocump, our Order’s Serene Reigner over

the Records; and

_Whereas_, Our royal hearts are deeply touched by this exercise of

the divine prerogative;

_Resolved_, That in all the relations of life he was truly majestic

and imperial.

_Resolved_, That we tender our royal sympathy to his surviving

Queen and the Princess and Princesses of his dynasty.

_Resolved_, That in testimony to his worth these resolutions be

engrossed on parchment and publicly displayed for thirty days in

the windows of a dry-goods shop.

The Protective League of Adult Orphans held a meeting before I was

cold, and passed the resolutions following:

_Whereas_, The flower that bloomed under the name of Peter Wodel

Mocump has been ruthlessly cut down by the Reaper whose name is

Death; and

_Whereas_, He was a pansy; be it, therefore,

_Resolved_, That in his removal this League has lost a sturdy

champion of the rights of orphans; and be it further

_Resolved_, That a general boycott be, and hereby is, declared

against all orphans outside this Protective League.

The Ancient and Honorable Order of Divorced Men eulogized me in the

strongest language as one who had possessed in a high and conspicuous

degree every qualification for membership in their Order. By the

Murderers’ Mutual Resentment Association I was described as one whose

time, talent and fortune were ever at the service of those injured in

the world’s esteem by the judicial practice of alluding to the past.

The League of Persons Having Moles on Their Necks said that, apart from

the unusual size of my mole, I had ever shown a strong zeal for the

public welfare and the advancement of civilization.

I gathered up these various evidences of worth. I got together all the

obituary notices from the newspapers, which showed with a singular

unanimity that I was greatly addicted to secret almsgiving (how

did they know it?) and that I was without a fault of character or

disposition. I copied the inscription on my headstone and the verses in

the death-column of the _Morning Buglehorn_—some of its death editor’s

happiest and most striking lines. Altogether, this literature made a

pretty large volume of eulogy. I had it printed and bound (in the Other

World sense) and copiously indexed. It was the best reading I ever saw.

The time arrived for me to appear at the gate of Heaven and make a

personal demand for admission. I was notified of the hour when I would

be heard, and was on hand. St. Peter received me with a smile and said:

“We are full of business to-day; be brief and speak to the point.

What do you know of yourself that entitles you to a seat in the blest

abodes?”

I smiled rather loftily but without _hauteur_, and silently handed

him the volume, bearing in golden letters on the cover the title: “My

Record.” St. Peter turned over the leaves deliberately, read a passage

here and there and handed it back, saying:

“My friend, you have run into a streak of hard luck. The persons who

have given you so good a character—the societies, newspapers, etc.—are

unknown to me, and I don’t wish to say anything against them. But they

have been backing a good many applicants lately, and I have let in a

few on their judgment. Well, this very morning I got this note. I don’t

mind letting you read it if you won’t say I showed it. You will see I

can’t do anything for you.”

He handed me a letter with about half the envelope torn off by careless

opening. It read as follows:

DEAR PETER,—There has been quite a number of disturbances in here

lately, and three or four cases of scandalous misconduct on the

part of the saints, one of whom, in fact, eloped with an angel.

Another was arrested for pocketing some of the golden pavement, and

some have been trying to become famous by cutting their initials in

the bark of the Tree of Life. Inquiry shows that in every instance

the offender is a recent arrival, always a prominent citizen and a

member of a number of “societies.” I won’t overrule your action,

but really the character of this place is changing. I must ask you

to stick to the old tests—a godly life and a humble acceptance of

the Christian religion.

When I saw the Name that was signed to that note I could not utter a

word. I turned away and came Here.

THE FOOL

(_Bits of Dialogue from an Unpublished Morality Play_)

I

FOOL—I have a question for you.

PHILOSOPHER—I have many, for myself. Do you happen to have heard that a

fool can ask what a philosopher is unable to answer?

F.—I happen to have heard that if that is true the one is as great a

fool as the other.

PH.—What presumption! Philosophy is search for truth; folly is

submission to happiness.

F.—But happiness is the sole desire and only possible purpose of man.

PH.—Has virtue no other end?

F.—The other end of virtue is the beginning.

PH.—Instructed, I sit at your feet.

F.—Unwilling to instruct, I stand on my head.

——————

PHILOSOPHER—You say that happiness is the sole desire of man. This is

much disputed.

FOOL—There is happiness in disputation.

PH.—But Socrates says—

F.—He was a Grecian. I hate foreigners.

PH.—Wisdom is of no country.

F.—Of none that I have observed.

——————

PHILOSOPHER—Let us return to our subject, happiness as the sole desire

of man. Crack me these nuts. (1) The man that endures a life of toil

and privation for the good of others.

FOOL—Does he feel remorse for so doing? Does he not rather like it?

PH.—(2) He who, famishing himself, gives his loaf to a beggar.

F.—There are those who prefer benevolence to bread.

PH.—(3) How of him who goes joyfully to martyrdom at the stake?

F.—He goes joyfully.

PH.—And yet—

F.—Did you ever talk with a good man going to the stake?

PH.—I never saw one going to the stake.

F.—Unfavored observer!—you were born a century too early.

——————

PHILOSOPHER—You say that you hate foreigners. Why?

FOOL—Because I am human.

PH.—But so are they.

F.—I thank you for the better reason.

——————

PHILOSOPHER—I have been thinking of the pocopo.

FOOL—So have I; what is it?

PH.—The pocopo is a small Brazilian animal, chiefly remarkable for

singularity of diet. A pocopo eats nothing but other pocopos. As these

are not easily obtained, the annual mortality from starvation is very

great. As a result, there are fewer mouths to feed, and by consequence

the race is rapidly multiplying.

F.—From whom had you this?

PH.—A professor of political economy.

F.—Let us rise and uncover.

——————

FOOL—A foreign student of the English language read the report of a

colloquy between a fool and a philosopher. The remarks of the fool were

indicated by the letter F; those of the philosopher by the letters

PH—as ours will be if Heaven raise up a great, wise man to report them.

PHILOSOPHER—Well?

F.—Nothing. Ever thereafter the misguided foreign student spelled

“fool” with ph and philosopher with an f.

PH.—Neo-Platonist!

——————

II

FOOL—If I were a doctor—

DOCTOR—I should endeavor to be a fool.

F.—You would fail—folly is not achieved, but upon the meritorious it is

conferred.

D.—For what purpose?

F.—For yours.

——————

FOOL—I have a friend who—

DOCTOR—Is in need of my assistance. Absence of excitement, absolute

quiet, a hard bed and a simple diet; that will cure him.

F.—Hardly. He is dead—he is taking your prescription.

D.—All but the simple diet.

F.—He is himself the diet.

D.—How simple.

——————

FOOL—What is the nastiest medicine?

DOCTOR—A fool’s advice.

F.—And what the most satisfactory disease?

D.—The most lingering one.

F.—To the patient, I mean.

D.—Paralysis of the thoracic duct.

F.—I am not familiar with it.

D.—It does not encourage familiarity. Paralysis of the thoracic duct

enables the patient to overeat without taking the edge off his appetite.

F.—What an admirable equipment for dining out! How long does the

patient’s unnatural appetite last?

D.—The time varies; always longer than he does.

F.—As an hypothesis, that is imperfectly conceivable. It sounds like a

doctrine.

——————

DOCTOR—Anything further?

FOOL—You attend a patient; nevertheless he recovers. How do you tell if

his recovery was because of your treatment or in spite of it?

D.—I never do tell.

F.—I mean, how do you know?

D.—I take the opinion of a person interested in such matters: I ask a

fool.

F.—How does the patient know?

D.—The fool asks me.

F.—You are very kind; how shall I prove my ingratitude?

D.—By close attention to the laws of health.

F.—God forbid!

——————

III

FOOL—Sir Cutthroat, how many orphans have you made to-day?

SOLDIER—The devil an orphan. Have you a family?

F.—Put up your iron; I am the last of my race.

S.—What!—no more fools?

F.—Not one, so help me! They have all gone to the wars. By the way, you

are somewhat indebted to me.

S.—Let us arbitrate your claim: arbitration is good for my trade.

F.—The only arbiter whose decision you respect is on your side. It

hangs there.

S.—It is impartial: it cuts both ways. For what am I indebted to you?

F.—For existence. Prevalence of me has made you possible.

S.—Possible? Sir, I am probable.

——————

SOLDIER—Why do you wear a cap and bells?

FOOL—The civic equivalent of a helmet and plume.

S.—Go “hang a calf-skin on those recreant limbs.”

F.—’Tis only wisdom should be bound in calf, for wisdom is the veal of

which folly is the matured beef.

S.—Then folly should be garbed in cowskin.

F.—Aye, that it may the sooner appear for what it is—the naked truth.

S.—How should it?

F.—You would soon strip off the hide to make harness and trappings

withal. No one thinks what conquerors owe to cows.

——————

FOOL—Tell me, hero, what is strategy?

SOLDIER—The art of putting two knives to one throat.

F.—And what is tactics?

S.—The art of drawing them across it.

F.—Fine! I read (in Joinville, I think) that during the Crusades the

armament of a warship comprised two hundred serpents. These be strange

weapons.

S.—What stuff a fool may talk! The great Rameses used to turn loose

lions against his enemies, but no true soldier would employ serpents.

Those snakes were used by sailors.

F.—A nice distinction, truly. Did you ever employ your blade in the

splitting of hairs?

S.—I have split masses of them!

——————

FOOL—Speaking of the Crusades—at the siege of Acre, when a part of the

wall had been thrown down by the Christians the Pisans rushed gallantly

into the breach, but the greater part of their army being at dinner,

they were bloodily repulsed. Was it not a shame that those feeders

should not stir from their porridge to succor their allies?

SOLDIER—Pray why should a man neglect his business to oblige a friend?

F.—But they might have conquered, and the city would have been open to

sacking and pillage.

S.—The selfish gluttons!

——————

FOOL—Why is a coachman’s uniform called a livery and a soldier’s livery

a uniform?

S.—Your presumption grows insupportable. Speak no more of matters that

you know nothing about.

F.—Such censorship would doom all tongues to inactivity. Test my

knowledge.

S.—What is war?

F.—An acute stage of logical politics.

S.—What is peace?

F.—A suspension of hostilities. An armistice for the purpose of digging

up the dead.

S.—I do not follow you.

F.—Then I have security without exertion.

S.—You damned half-ration!

OUR SMART SET

URBAN

The party given on Tuesday evening last at the residence of the Puffers

was an enjoyable occasion. Next door to the residence is a church,

and the festivities were frequently interrupted by an old-fashioned

prayer meeting that was going on in the sacred edifice—the “amens” and

“God-grant-its” being distinctly audible in the midst of the dance. The

nuisance was finally abated by the police, but not until many of the

guests had left the Puffer mansion in disgust.

The week has been prolific of social gaieties. The hospitable mansions

of the genteel, which were thrown shut during Lent, have been thrown

open again, and all has gone merry as a married belle. The list

of successful and long-to-be-remembered occasions is too long for

publication and too important for abbreviation. It can only be said

here, in a general way, that Society whooped it up great!

The engagement is announced of Mr. Dreffeldude P. Milquesoppe to Miss

Enameline Stuccup, the least-young daughter of our distinguished

townsman, Impyqu Stuccup, Esq., familiarly known as “the Golden

Pauper.” The wedding is to take place as soon as the old man can sell

his pigs.

On Wednesday H. Grabberson Tump led to the altar Miss Toozifoozle Bilc,

and having got her there, married her alive. The bridal presents were

gorgeous, being the famous “Set No. 3” from the well and favorably

known establishment of Pasticraft, Nickelgilt & Co.—the same set that

graced the showtable on the memorable occasion of the Whoopup-Hurroo

nuptials last fall.

The Society Editors’ League has purchased a new evening coat and

appointed a committee to arrange a uniform vocabulary—a social

Esperanto. The phrases, “palatial mansion,” “the hospitable doors

were thrown open,” “the rank, beauty and fashion,” “the festivities

were prolonged into the wee sma’ hours,” “Terpsichorean exercises

were indulged in,” “the elegant collation was done ample justice to,”

“joined in the holy bonds of wedlock,” will stand without revision.

A fancy-dress ball was given by the inmates of the insanity asylum last

Monday night. The only outmate present was the society editor of the

_Technologist_, who took the character of “The Lunatic,” and sustained

it with such fidelity that he was a marked man. They marked him “3397”

and kept him there.

Our distinguished townsman, the Hon. Dollop Gobb, whose public-spirited

investments in unimproved real estate have done so much to make this

city what she is, was received everywhere with great consideration

while in Europe. The brigands who captured him near Athens demanded

the largest ransom for him that has ever been exacted for an American.

When he ascended the Great Pyramid he was detained at the top until all

that he had excepting his underclothing had gone as backsheesh to the

downtrodden millions of Egypt. Innkeepers, couriers, guides, porters

and servants vied with one another in paying homage to success in the

person of this self-made American. Mr. Gobb believes that genuine worth

is better appreciated under monarchical forms of Government than it is

here.

Mr. Joel Hamfat is reported engaged to Mrs. John Bamberson, whose

husband is lying at the point of death. It is a genuine case of love at

first sight, Mr. Hamfat being the head of the measuring department of

the United Undertakers.

On Monday, at the Church of St. Iniquity (Episcopalian), the Rev. Dr.

Mammon Godder joined in the holy bonds of matrimony Jacob Abraham

Isaacson, of the firm of Isaacson, Isaacson & Isaacson, proprietors

of the Seventh Commandment Bazaar, to Miss Rebekah Katzenstein,

daughter of Aaron Levi Katzenstein, Esq., of Katzenstein, Abramson &

Lubeckheimer, gentlemen clothiers, No. 315 Little Kneedeep street.

The wedding—including breakfast, wines, decorations, carriages and

everything—cost more than a thousand dollars, but as the bride’s father

felicitously remarked, “Monish is noddings ven it is a qvestion of

doing somedings in a drooly Ghristian vay, don’t it?” It undoubtedly

does.

Old man Snoop has returned from Mud Springs much improved in age. His

daughter, Mrs. Major and Brevet Lieutenant-Colonel Straddleblind, has

engaged lodging and board for him at the Alms House, where his private

system of grammar will excite greater enthusiasm than it does at

Humility Hill, as the charming villa of the Straddleblinds is called.

The wedding of Miss Euphemia de Genlis Bullworthy-Clopsattle, the

second charming daughter of our distinguished fellow citizen, the Hon.

Aminadab Azrael Bullworthy Clopsattle, of “The Pollards,” to Jake

Snoots will not take place at once; the bride-to-be will first be

“confirmed.” She is wise—if anybody needs the consolation of religion

she will.

A reception in honor of the composer who wrote _Johnny, Get Your Gun_

was held on Thursday evening last at the pal. man. of Mrs. Macpogram,

who is herself a musician of no mean ability. The guest of the

evening—whose name we do not at this moment recall—sang the composition

which has made him famous from Maine to California. Afterward Miss

Castoria Hamfat rendered _Yow che m’ rumpus_ in excellent style, and

Mr. —— (the gentleman who composed the other thing) was tickled half to

death. We wish she had sung the whole opera.

Mr. and Mrs. Whackup have returned from Europe, bringing many objects

of art, some of which cost a great deal of money. Among them is

Turner’s “Boy Eating an Apple,” of which the distinguished critic, Col.

Twobottle, of Georgia, said that it would live as long as the language.

Another treasure of the Whackup collection is Titian’s portrait of

Mrs. Whackup’s aunt, painted by Signor Titian at one sitting. It is the

intention to have the frame made of real ormolu and set with brilliants.

The elegant entertainment last Tuesday evening at the palatial mansion

of our distinguished townsman, J. Giles Noovoreesh Esq., was shorn of

its intended proportions by the unexpected arrival of Mr. Noovoreesh

himself. Some of the gentlemen who graced the occasion with their

presence have not yet obtained their hats and overcoats. The scene

that followed the irruption of Mr. N. into the grand hall where

Terpsichorean festivities were eventuating is said by an eye-witness to

have been the grandest spectacle since the retreat from Waterloo.

A series of “Saturday morning _soirèes_” is announced at the suburban

residence of Mrs. Judge of the Court of Acquittal Smythe. It is Mrs.

Judge of the Court of Acquittal Symthe’s opinion that the uncommon hour

will enable her to invite the persons whom she does not want, as well

as the ladies and gentlemen whom she does.

Mrs. Lowt has had her ears pierced. It was done by the singing of her

second daughter, Miss Loobie.

From the list of persons whose presence added interest and charm to the

splendid obsequies of the late Mrs. Bangupper, on Thursday last, we

inadvertently omitted the name of the beautiful and accomplished Miss

Chippie Hifli. She was lovely in a costume from Chicago, and divided

honors with the remains.

Mrs. Suds will give a literary entertainment at her residence on Angel

avenue next Thursday evening, when her beautiful and gifted niece,

Miss Simpergiggle, will read Poe’s Raven. She is an _élocutioniste_

of remarkable powers, having twice received the highest honors in

Professor’s Drumlung’s class and once driven an audience mad. Her

rendering of _The Charge of the Light Brigade_ is said to be unlike

anything ever heard, and on one occasion it so fired the heart of a

young man who was engaged to her that he instantly broke off the match,

resolved to dedicate himself to the sword in the next war.

One of the most enjoyable parties of the season was given on Thursday

evening last by the hoodlumni of the little university around the

corner. The guests comprised nearly all the gentlemen who have

graduated during the past two years.

Miss Adiposa Brown wishes us to say that among those present at the

Sucklebuster wedding we observed Miss Addie P. Brown, who looked

enchanting in white silk and diamonds. We strive to please.

Last Thursday’s post-mortem reception at the costly mansion of the

Jonesmiths was a tasteful affair. The body of the hostess, in one of

Grimdole & Grewsums popular caskets, wore a magnificent moire-antique

Mother Hubbard and a look of serene peace adorned with pearls. The

coiffure was a triumph of the hair-dresser’s art. Too great praise

cannot be given to the skill and artistic taste of Miss Nobbie Chic,

under whose supervision the gorgeous apartments had been decorated with

all manner of griefery: a skull-and-cross-bones in black spatter-work

on a scarlet ground being particularly pleasing. The vegetable

tributes, including a skeleton in orange blossoms, were mostly from the

floral emporium of Jickster & Gonkle. When the lid of the casket was

screwed down there was noisier weeping than has ever been heard on any

similar occasion in this city: the guests literally weltered in woe.

Physicians declare that the apparently innocent habit of kissing lap

dogs is a fruitful source of contagion. They point to the recent

mortality among the dogs as confirmatory evidence.

Last Wednesday evening’s reception at the Slumsprung residence was

marred by the unexpected return of the old man. As it was understood

that he was in Milpitas, and would not be invited anyhow, many of the

guests had not taken the precaution to be armed, and for some time

the festivities were one-sided. Luckily the tide was turned by the

opportune arrival of Col. Spotshot. Silas Edward Slumsprung was born

at Dawkinsville, Missouri, October 3, 1845. Educated as a blacksmith

and fired with the spirit of adventure, he came to this state in 1870,

since which time his fame is familiar to even the most lowly: no name

has more prominently adorned the advertising columns of this journal

than that of the distinguished remains. We mourn our loss.

A successful party at Tarrytown—John D. Rockefeller.

Among the most honored guests at the Hull-Caboodle reception last

Thursday evening was Mr. Moriarty Monaghan, the distinguished inventor

of the steam chaperon.

At Mrs. Fastiddio’s _musicale_ last Thursday evening the harmony of the

occasion was somewhat marred by the sound of a desperate squabble in

the entrance hall as Professor Schwackenheimer was singing his famous

solo, _Dere’s moosic eferyvheres_. The fair hostess signified a wish

that the festivities should not be suspended, but even beauty is unable

to muzzle the press, and our reporter left the room to see what it

was all about. The hall porter, whose hair and clothing were greatly

deranged, explained with some excitement, between his gasps of fatigue,

that he’d been “a firin’ out another one o’ them dam antecedents.”

The Jacksprats are in Jebigue. They live there.

The engagement is announced of Hunker Gowk to the widow Jonesmith,

who will be remembered in connection with the road-house scandal of

ten years ago. The engagement having revived public interest in that

unfortunate episode in the life of the lady, it is related in full in

another column.

Our reporter was contumeliously treated at last Wednesday evening’s

hoe-down at the Robinson mansion. This is the more surprising because

the hostess is one of our oldest and most esteemed landmarks and is

sincerely devoted to study of books on etiquette to make up for her

early disadvantages. We forgive it as a mere _reversio ad naturam_.

Miss Enameline Cartilagina Cmythe is visiting the mummy of Rameses II,

in Cairo. They were schoolmates.

They are telling (under the breath) of a clever thing which Mrs. Rooley

said the other day. “My dear,” said an old schoolgirl friend whom she

had not met since her marriage, “how could you venture to marry Mr.

Rooley with that awful scandal hanging over you?” “The most natural

thing in the world,” was the placid reply. “People were beginning to

talk, and I married Mr. Rooley at once to keep him from hearing about

it.”

The Princess Bulli-Bulli is at the Golden Hotel. She will be remembered

as the lady who kept the peanut parlors at 9276 Cobble street in the

old days. Since she has got royal blood in her veins her Highness is,

of course, somewhat haughty and cold in her manner, and has on two or

three occasions inflicted severe injuries on the hotel servants; but

she is at heart a true American lady and has six dogs.

Mrs. Excrusia Blogg gave a party last Tuesday in celebration of her

thirtieth birthday. Among the names of those not invited was that of

the fair hostess’ daughter, Mrs. Rougeline Blogg-Dumperton, who with

her five lovely children lives just over the way. The particulars of

the estrangement are not known.

In diamonds it is the fashion to have the breakfast sets entirely

different from those worn at dinner. Nothing so conspicuously

distinguishes the true lady as the jewelry she wears at breakfast. Mrs.

Bluegore, the wife of the Hon. Asa Bluegore, M. C., is a model in this

way; her diamonds always look as if she had slept in them, they are

worn with so negligent a grace.

At five-and-half o’clock teas it is _en règle_ for the hostess to stir

each cup of the beverage with her forefinger before administering it to

the patient. This assures so low a temperature that the tea is retained

in the system.

Miss Exquisitia Multiboodle and father are registered at the Majestic

hotel.

The Tooquites, the Culcherfads and the Refinings are at the Divine.

Old Mumchortle and his mahala are at the Squaremeal.

There will be another _musicale_ next Tuesday evening at the residence

of Mrs. Jonas Goard. Professor Henrj Beerbellj will be present with

his violin, and will play some choice selections from Schopenhauer,

Mazzini, Gambetta and Murillo. Mrs. Goard says it is her intention to

make her weekly _musicales_ the most peerless that money will collar.

The Hiflungs are at the Splurge House. Their health has not been good

since their return from Europe, Colonel Hiflung, Miss Hiflung, Miss

Phlebotomy Hiflung and Masters Thanatopsis and Epithalamium Hiflung all

suffering more or less acutely from brain failure.

Gargoyle Squutney has arrived from Paris, where he had the distinction

of ascending the Eiffel Tower. The Emperor paid him a great deal of

attention and he met the Tuilleries.

Society is justly indignant at the threatened publication of an _Èlite

Directory_ with an “Appendix of Antecedents.” Strenuous efforts at

suppression have resulted in nothing, so far, but hopes are entertained

of conciliating the author and publisher with an invitation to the

Pursang luncheon next week. In the mean time that hardy and desperate

man speaks of the ladies and gentlemen whom he weakly maligns in the

columns of an infamous daily newspaper as “Our Sore Hundred.”

The fashion of leaving the dog’s card with that of the mistress is

obtaining favor again.

The new spring-style coffins have oxidized silver trimmings.

Our distinguished townsman, the Hon. Mr. Col. Samuel Jiggs, Esquire, is

understood to deprecate Society’s attitude toward him. He has confided

to a prominent society man the fact that he is tired of attending his

wife’s entertainments and hearing himself addressed by her guests as

“Sam” and “Jiggsy.” He purposes, he says, to make certain radical

improvements in the next galoots as allows they kin prosper withouten

good manners.

At the funeral of Miss Nobbie Skihi, last Thursday, the corpse was

attired in a Directoire costume from Worth’s, and wore a diamond and

sapphire necklace valued, according to the tag, at $15,000. In removing

this at the close of the entertainment, the mother of the deceased was

overcome with emotion, which found audible expression. The lady’s voice

is a clear soprano of remarkable power.

The Lalligaggs have taken rooms at the Hotel Paradise for the winter

and the Mollicoddles for the storm. The Von Doodles are reported as

storming at Hohokus.

At the Rodaigent-Cadje wedding reception a new and admirable feature

was introduced. On one end of a table were displayed the wedding

presents, with the donor’s names attached. On the other end was a large

number of wooden naughts, gilt and variously decorated. These bore

the names of friends and acquaintances who gave nothing. It is said

that some of the persons blacklisted have applied to the police for

protection.

Mrs. Wollysnopple is in town again, where, being at present afflicted

with smallpox, she has a wide circle of acquaintances.

The beautiful and accomplished Miss Vaseline Upshoot damaged one of

her toes last week in alighting from a street car. It was the sweetest

little accident in the world, and the fair sufferer underwent a

charming amputation.

The Impycu family, who are at Gophertown, Hog Valley, wish us to state

that they are traveling in Europe. So are we.

Mrs. Breezy O’Blairney has offered the Academy of Sciences a

magnificent oil portrait of her late husband, the Hon. Moriarty Fitz

Flaherty O’Blairney. It is reported that the Academy is willing to

compromise.

A pleasing incident in high life occurred the other evening at a

_conversazione_ given by Mrs. Fastidiana Rushereeeee, _nèe_ Scroggins.

The fair hands of the distinguished and wealthy hostess had worked in

violets on a yellow ground the following chaste and elegant lines,

which adorned one of the walls:

Here mind meets mind on the occasion

Of an intellectual _conversazione_.

A gentleman of some literary pretensions from Boston enticed the

hostess aside, and in the most cowardly manner intimated that she had

erred in pronunciation, or else had a bad ear for rhyme. The insulted

lady apprised the other gentlemen present of what had been said to

her in her own house, and the fellow was energetically booted abroad,

returning not any more to that place. And that is the pleasing incident

above referred to.

Mrs. Follyswaddle’s reception in honor of Lord ‘Arry Chortle of Wapping

was enjoyable until his lordship was taken drunk; then the festivities

were parted in the middle.

The Tollipoodles are Octobering in Sprouleville—all except the old

man, who is Tollipoodling here, in the regular way. In him there is

neither change nor shadow of turning—such as creation’s dawn beheld he

Tollipoodleth now.

The wake of Malone Finucain last Thursday night was marred by but a

single untoward incident—the corpse got up and kicked everybody out

of the house. The widow desires us to say that the second wake of the

series will take place at a date not now determined, and each guest

will be supplied at the door with an attested copy of a physician’s

certificate of death.

One of the most interesting souvenirs of royalty that this country can

boast is in the possession of Miss Celeritie Hifli of this city. It

was given to Miss Hifli by his Royal Highness the Prince of Wales, who

greatly admired her beauty. The souvenir is a Bank of England ten-pound

note, which Miss Hifli has had framed and exhibits with pardonable

pride. After the first few shocks, it is quite charming to observe her

ingenuous way of speaking of his Royal Highness as “Al.”

Society is discussing a shocking scandal. It is difficult to get the

particulars from an authentic source, but they are believed to be

about as follows: Three weeks ago, on the death of Miss R——, the body

was placed in the handsome tomb of Colonel H——, an old friend of the

family, the fine mausoleum of the R——s being incomplete. The only

occupant of the tomb when the body of Miss R—— was placed there was

the remains of Colonel H——’s brother, but for the sake of propriety

Mrs. X——, a friend of both families, had the mortal part of her

mother conveyed there from another place. But on Tuesday last Mrs.

X——, without notifying the R——s, had her mother’s body removed and

sent East. From that day until yesterday the remains of Miss R—— were

without a chaperon. Great indignation is felt against Mrs. X——, and it

is thought that her action will seriously affect her social standing.

RURAL

The festivities last Wednesday evening at the Turveypool mansion

scooped the ranch. It was the slickest outfit of the season, and will

shine in the annals of society worse than a new tin pan. The genial

hostess was as affable as a candidate for coroner, and pitchforked her

smiles about without caring a cuss where they struck and stuck. She’s

the whitest woman in this social camp, and don’t you forget it.

Mrs. Flyorbust gave a reception on Friday evening, which in point of

pure elegance knocked everything perfectly cold and was a regular

round-up of beauty, rank and fashion. The fair hostess’ long residence

in the social centers of Europe, where she experted some of the

niftiest occasions, has taught her how to do such things white. Among

those present we observed Mr. Flyorbust, Miss Flyorbust, Miss Georgiana

Glorinda Flyorbust, and Master Tom Busted.

The engagement is announced of Mr. Megacephaloid Polliglot Paupertas,

the distinguished and popular scion of the Munniglut stock, to a

lady of acceptable fortune but humble birth, who is not at present

in society and is therefore nameless in these columns. The wedding

is expected to take place as soon as this person can dispose of some

property in Hangtown. If the sale is auspiciously consummated the

nuptials will eventuate with unscrupulous grandiosity.

Society is unaffected by Lent: Mrs. Vulgaria de Binks-Browne says that

she means to give a dizzy party next Wednesday evening and put on as

much dog as anybody or bust a-trying. Those near to Mrs. Binks-Browne

hope that she will succeed.

We were honored yesterday by a call from the eminent statesman, the

Hon. Braygong Bumble, and his distinguished dog. They remained an hour

and left, going in the direction of our loathsome contemporary, _The

Squeege_. It is to be hoped they did not tarnish their respective

escutcheons by calling on the presiding felon of that gang, and they

probably did not, for the voice of fame has not pointed the finger of

discovery at him.

Old man Blivens wants the public to get onto the racket that his fat

girl, Piggy Jane, is effectuating. As nearly as we could tumble to it

from the elderly party’s prospectus, it is to be a lavender feed. The

guests are not expected to eat that herb of the field, unless they want

to, but its color will pervade the occasion like an undertone of garlic

in a Dago Christmas. Ladies whose rinds don’t hitch well with lavender

had better stay at home and go to the circus.

Mrs. Colonel Pompinuppy’s Wednesday evenings will henceforth eventuate

on Thursday afternoons. At the next one Signora Fahertini, a Dutch

_cantatreechy_, will squawk up some classical music that will make the

hair curl.

Pimply Johnson is pinching out at his Burro street shack. The medicine

man has tooted his doom, but says he may possibly pull through the

week. Keep your northwest eye open for an enjoyable funeral if it is

Christian weather. The remains will be _cached_ in the natty mausoleum

erected by them during life.

The services last Sunday evening at the Church of the Holy Jones

were enlivened by the presence of the beautiful Miss Marie Jeanne

Hodj, who brandished the most paralyzing follyswaddles of any hen in

the kaboodle. Her leading figleaf was of nun’s-unavailing, with a

demi-train which responded rhythmically to every lateral impulse of

her willowy figure. The rest of her outfit we didn’t slate. Miss Hodj

looked sweet enough to eat!

At the reception, last Tuesday evening, at the Loftinudle mansion, the

many guests gracing the occasion with their presence were profoundly

affected by the costliness and elegance of everything in the house and

its appointments. No one thing knocked them silly, but there was a

general allroundishness that laid ’em out like dead! It is universally

admitted that the Loftinudle shack is uncommonly tough to tackle, and

it is not thought that any of the shanties now going up in Smith’s

Addition will be able to hold a candle to it. There are some persons,

however, who expect old Loftinudle will himself hold a candle to it, as

the insurance is significantly heavy.

The Squuljees are now established in their new Malaria county villa,

Skunkmead. The house, which is of the Renuisance style, is fitted

with all the ancient and modern conveniences, and the whole place has

been happily described by a reporter of the _Malarian_ as strongly

resembling Mr. Elysian’s fields. Mrs. Squuljee, Miss Squuljee and Miss

Carameline Squuljee were in the city yesterday and were seen at a

distance by our reporter. Unluckily they had seen him first.

The Bachelor’s Club is madder than a wet cat. It was first flung to

the breeze to enable the unmarried roosters to return-match the old

hens who entertain them at the henneries; but the chaps do it so white

that now the o. h.’s don’t put up at all. We plank down our in’ardest

sympathy in the business, but that’s all we can do; owing to the

death of a heavy advertiser the o. h. appertaining to our loathsome

contemporary isn’t branching out into social gaieties much at the

present writing.

Mr. James O’Squander and Mrs. Jane McMillion are to be married next

Hangman’s day—that day being selected in memory of the bridegroom’s

sainted father. It was of this engagement that the Bard of Tar Flat,

Ferd Anderson Snooks, penned his brutal couplet, published by a

disgusting contemporary:

Jim will tie to Jane in the holy bonds of wedlock,

But ere a year is gone he’ll be scraping round on bedrock.

A Leap Year party was given on Monday evening at the Coyote District

school-house, Potato county. The Temple of Science was beautifully

decorated, the words “Leep Yeer,” tastily executed in colored chalks on

the black-board, being conspicuously pleasing. They were the work of

the teacher.

The McCorkle crowd is Novembering at Iron Springs. That summer place

of last resort does not advertise in this journal, but we know enough

about it from other sources to whack up our deepest dollar on the

proposition that the essence of latch-key which Mother Earth spits out

at that place will knock the McCorkle livers galley west.

THE EVOLUTION OF A STORY

On a calm evening in the early summer, a young girl stood leaning

carelessly against a donkey at the top of Plum Hill, daintily but with

considerable skill destroying a biscuit by mastication’s artful aid.

The sun had been for some time behind the sea, but the conscious West

was still suffused with a faint ruddiness, like the reflection from an

army of boiled lobsters marching below the horizon for a flank attack

upon the stomach of Boston.

Slowly and silently the ruby legion held its way. Not a word was

spoken; commands given by the general were passed from mouth to

mouth, like a single bit of chewing gum amongst the seven children

immortalized by Edward Bok, who was more than usually active this

evening, if that were possible.

And it was possible; in no spirit of bravado, but with firm reliance

on the _blanc mange_ he had eaten for dinner, and which was even now

shaping itself into exquisite fancies in the laboratory of his genius,

the great editor had resolved to reach a higher excellence, or perish

in the attempt, as the tree frog, baffled by the smooth bark of the

beech, falls exhausted into the spanning jaws of the serpent biding his

time below.

Having swallowed the frog, the reptile turned to go away, and by a

sinuous course soon reached the highway. Here he stood up and looked

about him. There was no living thing in sight. To the right hand and

the left the dusty white road stretched away without a break in its

dreary, mathematical sameness. Beyond a belt of pines on the opposite

side rose a barren, rounded hilltop, resembling the bald crown of a

game keeper thrust upward from behind a hedge to offer a shining mark

for the poacher.

Grimly the poacher raised and sighted his gun, charged with a double

quantity of heavy slugs. There was a moment of silence—a silence so

profound, so deathlike in its intensity, that a keen ear might have

heard the spanking of an infant in a distant village.

This infant had come, no one knew whence. The story went that it had

tramped into town one cold morning, with its cradle slung across its

back, and after being refused admittance to the hotel, had gone quietly

to the back door and lain down, having first written and pinned to its

gown the following placard: “This unfortunate child is the natural

son of a foreign prince, who until he shall succeed to the throne of

his ancestors begs that the illustrious waif may be tenderly cared

for. His Royal Highness cannot say how long his own worthless father

may continue to disgrace the realm, but hopes not long. At the end of

that time, his Royal Highness will appear to the child’s astonished

benefactor, crusted as thickly with gems as a toad with warts.”

These troublesome excrescences had given the poor toad much pain.

Everything that science had devised, and skill applied, had been a mere

waste of money; and now at the age of four hundred years, with life

just opening before him, with other toads reveling about him in all the

jump-up-and-come-down-hardness of their hearts he was compelled to drag

himself nervelessly through existence, with no more hope of happiness

than a piano has of marriage.

It was not a nice piano; the keys were warped, the mainspring was

relaxed, the cogwheels would not have anything to do with one another,

and the pendulum would swing only one way. Altogether a disreputable

and ridiculous old instrument. But such as it was, it had stood in

that dim old attic, man and boy, for more than thirty years. Its very

infirmities, by exciting pity, had preserved it; not one of the family

would have laid an axe at the root of that piano for as much gold as

could be drawn by a team of the strongest horses.

Of these rare and valuable animals we shall speak in our next chapter.

THE ALLOTMENT

“Doubtless we have all great gratitude this night of Thanksgiving.

Doubtless, too, we have ample cause and justification, for the dullest

crack-brain of us all knows that life might have gone harder with

him had the Power that compounds our joys and pains proportioned

differently, to that end, the simples of the mixture.”

So reading, I fell asleep, for I was full of bird. Straight appeared to

me an angel, the dexter half of whom was white, the sinister, black—the

line of division parting him from the hair down. Two skins of wine

he bore; one wine was clear and sweet, and one was dark and bitter

exceeding, such as would make a pig squeal. I saw, also, at his feet as

he stood, some large glass vessels of even size, marked from bottom to

top with a scale, the divisions numbered upward from 1 to 100.

“Son of Mortality,” said he, “I am the Compounding Power—behold my

standard mixture.” So saying he poured into one of the vessels 50 parts

of sweet and the same of bitter. “This,” he said, “is without taste.

It is for him whom Heaven doth neither bless nor afflict. There is but

one such that liveth.”

“The devil!” I cried, for indeed I greatly marveled that this should be

so.

Said the angel: “Guess again.”

“Compound now, I beseech thee,” I said, “the best that thou hast use

for in thy business: a tipple of surpassing richness—one which maketh

the hair to curl.”

Thereupon he put into the second vessel 1 part of bitter and 9 of

sweet. And he looked upon it saying: “It is the best that it is

permitted to me to do.”

“Show me,” I said, “the worst; for truly it must be exceeding fierce,

slaying at eighty rods.”

“It is bad to take,” he answered, and straightway poured into the third

vessel 10 parts of sweet. Then, upraising the other skin, he filled

the vessel to the brim, and a great compassion fell upon my spirit,

thinking on the unhappy man who should get himself outside that unholy

tope.

“Behold,” said the angel, “Heaven is just! The ratio of pain to joy in

the lot of the happiest mortal is the same as that of joy to pain in

his who is most wretched. It is 1 to 10.” And after some little time

he spake again:

“I’m a dandy for fairness.”

“True, O Dandy Allotter,” I said: “the proportions are only reversed.

But these two vessels, the second and the third, holding the good

draught and the bad—lo! the good is but a tenth part full, whilst the

latter overfloweth the vessel. Is each quantity a dose?”

And the angel said: “Each is a dose.”

Wherefore I raised my voice against him, and called him out of his

name, and cast my pillow upon him, and he departed out of that place

with a loud cry. Then they that came in haste to my chamber, unbidden,

looked one upon another and said: “He ate of the bird.”

LACKING FACTORS

Gender is the sex of words. But either this matter of sex is

imperfectly understood, or Nature has made faulty provision for the

duality of things; for history and speech show many melancholy examples

of natural celibacy, and Shelley’s dictum that “nothing in the world is

single” must be accepted with the large limitation of a comprehensive

denial. Who ever heard of an alligatrix? The spinster—has she anywhere

a femaler mate, the spinstress? I am told there is an article, a

garment, if I have rightly understood—called a garter, and that it has

commonly a mate, yet I know not if any one has seen a gartress. Nor,

for that matter, a garter. Has the cypress a lord and master known as

the cypor? We hear of personal encounters, but a personal encounter

between two ladies is not an encountress. Every one knows that an

epistle is a female apostle, but why the male mate of the unlisted

himmit should, except for consistency in perversion, be called a

hermit, who can say? Oddly enough, the shero is unknown to fame. Is

there a place beyond the grave of the sinner, called Heol, and was its

existence hinted at in the old name for Sheol? In Irish folklore is no

mention of the banhee. An ornithologist of even the widest attainments

will assure you that the queenfisher is an undiscovered fowl. Ancient

history, sacred or profane, is vainly questioned concerning the King

of Heba—whom nevertheless, I love to figure to myself as making a long

journey to lay countless camel loads of gifts at the feet of the very

wisest sovereign in all the world—the queen of the Shebrews.

A CALIFORNIAN STATESMAN

Persons who have not had the advantage of hearing about the Hon. Henry

Vrooman in the past ten or twelve years will be surprised to learn that

he is still living. The man has more lives than a ship-load of cats

from Malta. In the past few years he has been dying of heart disease

so fast that he is in danger of becoming extinct. His death-rate is

appalling! He has died in every voting precinct in this part of the

state, and his last words are about to be compiled in three volumes.

Whenever Mr. Vrooman wants “the suffrages of his fellow-citizens” he

gets them together in a hall, makes them a speech, assures them that

his sands of life are pretty nearly run out, closes with some neat and

appropriate patriotic sentiment suitable to the sad occasion, and then

flops down and dies all over the floor. Just before the vital spark is

extinct the meeting is adjourned by turning off the gas and the corpse

is at liberty to rise and go home. The next morning Mr. Vrooman’s

political organ relates how he was snatched from the jaws of death,

though his condition is still critical; and the sovereign electors

say: “Well, poor feller, he’s on his last legs anyway—guess it won’t

do much harm to elect him.” The wretch never drew a cent of salary

without committing the crime of obtaining money by false pretenses; he

is always elected on the understanding that he is to die.

But he doesn’t die—he is immortal. The moment that the “innumerable

caravan” has passed the polling place he drops out of the procession

and hangs about for his certificate of election. Then we hear no more

about his poor heart until his term is about to expire, when it begins

to trouble him again. He and his term generally manage to expire

together in the sure and certain hope of a blessed resurrection.

In the closing hours of the last session of the state senate somebody

made a motion to limit all speeches to ten minutes. This brought Mr.

Vrooman to his hind feet forthwith. “Mr. President,” he said, “standing

as I do upon the threshold of the Unknown, and turning back to address

my fellow-citizens for the last time, I feel grateful indeed that an

all-wise Providence has so ordered it that my final words can be spoken

in advocacy of the righteous and beneficent principle of free speech,

and in denunciation of the reptiles who would limit the liberty of

debate. With a solemn sense of my responsibility to Him from whom I

received my mental powers, and to whom I am so soon to give an account

of my stewardship; gazing with a glazing eye upon the transitory scenes

of earth, about which ‘the dark Plutonian shadows gather on the evening

blast’; conscious that the lute-string is about to snap and the pitcher

to be broken at the well, I adjure you, friends of my former days, as

in a whisper from the dark, not to let that motion prevail.”

Wiping a light froth from his lips, the failing senator, with a friend

under each arm and a half-dozen volunteer pall-bearers following,

solemnly left the chamber to the sound of a dozen busy pens drafting

resolutions of respect.

A moment later Senator Moffitt walked into the hall, dexterously

caught the presiding officer’s eye, and said: “Mr. President, it is

my mournful duty to apprise this honorable body of my distinguished

colleague’s continued existence. Born of poor but thoughtless parents

and educated as a blacksmith; gifted with a penetrating intelligence

which never failed in the darkest night to distinguish a five-dollar

piece from a nickel, yet blessed with an impartial soul which loved

the humbler coin as well, in proportion to its value, as the nobler

one; blessed with a benevolence which relieved alike the rich man and

the poor—the one of his coin, the other of his character; reared in

the principles of religion and giving to the worship of himself an

incredible devotion—this great man moved among the property of his

neighbors, a living instance of the power of personal magnetism and

the strength of political attachment. He was a generous man: one-half

of all that he took with his right hand he bestowed upon his left. He

was a respecter of Truth, and did not profane her with his lips. He

was a patriot: other nations might be more powerful in arms, or more

glorious in history, but America was good enough for him if he could

get it. Withal, he had a tender heart acutely responsive to indigestion

and closely identified with the political history of this state. Mr.

President, I move that when the senate adjourn to go to luncheon it do

so out of respect to the memory of Henry Vrooman. True, he is no deader

than he was when he began to die ten years ago, but, sir, a memorial

adjournment may have a deeper and better significance than is visible

in a mere conformity to fact: it may entoken a pious people’s readiness

to submit to a tardy bereavement.”

Senator Moffitt’s motion was peremptorily and contumeliously declared

out of order, and that erring statesman dejectedly took his seat a

sadder and a nicer man. It saddens to add that he solaced himself

by consuming the public stationery in composing the following

discreditable epitaph:

Step lightly, stranger, o’er this holy place,

Nor push this sacred monument aside,

Set by his fellow-citizens to grace

The only spot where Vrooman never died.

1888.

THE END

Transcriber’s Notes:

- Text enclosed by underscores is in italics (_italics_).

- Blank pages have been removed.

- A few obvious typographical errors have been silently corrected,

otherwise deliberately inconsistent or inventive spelling has been

left as is.