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