THE EDITOR OF OUR DAILY PAPER--THE APPEARANCE AND PERSONAL
CHARACTERISTICS OF COLONEL BANGS--THE AFFAIR WITH THE
TOMBSTONE--ART NEWS--COLONEL BANGS IN THE HEAT OF A POLITICAL
CAMPAIGN--PECULIAR TROUBLES OF PUBLIC SINGERS--THE PHENOMENA OF
MENAGERIES--EXTRAORDINARY SAGACITY OF THE ANIMALS--THE WILD MAN OF
AFGHANISTAN.
[Illustration]
The editor of our daily paper, _The Morning Argus_, is Col.
Bangs--Colonel Mortimer J. Bangs. The colonel is an exceedingly
important personage in the village, and he bears about him the air of a
man who is acutely conscious of the fact. The gait of the colonel, the
peculiar way in which he carries his head, the manner in which he swings
his cane, and the art he has of impressing any one he happens to address
with a feeling that he is performing an act of sublime condescension in
permitting himself to hold communication with an inferior being, combine
to excite in the vulgar mind a sentiment of awe. The eminent journalist
manifests in his entire bearing his confidence in the theory that upon
him devolves the responsibility of forming the public opinion of the
place; and there is a certain grandeur in the manner in which he conveys
to the public mind, through the public eye, the fact that while he
appreciates the difficulties of what seemed to be an almost superhuman
task, which would surely overwhelm men of smaller intellectual calibre,
the work presents itself to his mind as something not much more
formidable than pastime.
The appearance of Colonel Bangs is not only imposing, but sometimes
it inclines to be almost ferocious. The form in which he wears his
whiskers, added to the military nature of his title, would be likely to
give to timid strangers an idea not only that the colonel has a raging
and insatiable thirst for blood and an almost irresistible appetite
for the horrors of war, but that upon very slight provocation he would
suddenly grasp his sword, fling away the scabbard, and then proceed
to wade through slaughter to a throne and shut the gates of mercy on
mankind. But I rejoice to say that the colonel has not really such
murderous and revolutionary inclinations. His title was obtained in
those early years of peace when he led the inoffensive forces of the
militia upon parade, and marshaled them as they braved the perils of the
target-shooting excursion.
[Illustration]
I think I am warranted in saying that Colonel Bangs would never
voluntarily stand in the imminent deadly breach if there happened to be
a man there with a gun who wanted him to leave, and that he will never
seek the bubble reputation at the cannon's mouth unless the cannon
happens to be unloaded. Place Colonel Bangs in front of an empty cannon,
and for a proper consideration he would remain there for years without
the quiver of a muscle. Charge that piece of ordnance with powder and
ball, and not all the wealth of the world would induce him to stand
anywhere but in the rear of the artillery.
The _Argus_ has never appeared to me to be an especially brilliant
journal. To the intelligent and critical reader, indeed, the controlling
purpose of the colonel seems to be to endeavor to ascertain how near he
can bring the paper to imbecility without actually reaching that
condition; and it is surprising how close a shave he makes of it. When
we first came to the village, a gleam of intelligence now and then
appeared in the editorial columns of the _Argus_, and this phenomenon
was generally attributed to the circumstance that Colonel Bangs had
permitted his assistant editor to spread his views before the public. On
such occasions it was entertaining to observe in what manner the colonel
would assume the honors of the authorship of his assistant's articles.
Cooley, for instance, meeting him upon the street would observe:
[Illustration]
"That was an uncommonly good thing, colonel, which appeared in the
_Argus_ this morning on The Impending Struggle; whose was it?"
COLONEL BANGS (with an air of mingled surprise and indignation). "Whose
was it? Whose was that article? I suppose you are aware, sir, that _I_
am the editor of THE MORNING ARGUS!"
COOLEY. "Yes; but I thought perhaps--"
COLONEL (with grandeur). "No matter, sir, what you thought. When an
article appears in my own paper, Mr. Cooley, there is but a single
inference to be drawn. When I find myself unable to edit the _Argus_, I
will sell out, sir--I will sell out!"
COOLEY (calmly). "Well, but Murphy, your assistant, told me distinctly
that he wrote that editorial himself."
COLONEL (coming down). "Ah! yes, yes! that is partly true, now I
remember. I believe Murphy did scratch off the body of the article, but
I overhauled it; it was necessary for me to revise it, to touch it up,
to throw it into shape, as it were, before it went into type. Murphy
means well, and with a little guidance--just a l-e-e-t-l-e careful
training--he will do."
[Illustration]
But Murphy did not remain long. One of the colonel's little nephews
died, and a man who kept a marble-yard in Wilmington thought he might
obtain a gratuitous advertisement by giving to the afflicted uncle a
substantial expression of his sympathy. So he got up a gravestone for
the departed child. The design, cut upon the stone in bas-relief,
represented an angel carrying the little one in his arms and flying
away with it, while a woman sat weeping upon the ground. It was executed
in a most dreadful manner. The tombstone was sent to the colonel, with a
simple request that he would accept it. As he was absent, Mr. Murphy
determined to acknowledge the gift, although he had not the slightest
idea what it meant. So the next morning he burst out in the _Argus_ with
the following remarks:
"ART NEWS.
[Illustration]
"We have received from the eminent sculptor, Mr. Felix Mullins of
Wilmington, a comic _bas-relief_ designed for an ornamental fireboard.
It represents an Irishman in his night-shirt running away with the
little god Cupid, while the Irishman's sweetheart demurely hangs her
head in the corner. Every true work of art tells its own story; and we
understand, as soon as we glance at this, that our Irish friend has been
coqueted with by the fair one, and is pretending to transfer his love to
other quarters. There is a lurking smile on the Irishman's lips which
expresses his mischievous intentions perfectly. We think it would have
been better, however, to have clothed him in something else than a
night-shirt, and to have smoothed down his hair. We have placed this
_chef d'oeuvre_ upon a shelf in our office, where it will undoubtedly
be admired by our friends when they call. We are glad to encourage such
progress in Delaware art."
This was painful. When the colonel returned next day, Mr. Mullins called
on him and explained the tombstone to him, and that very night Mr.
Murphy retired from the _Morning Argus_, and began to seek fresh fields
for the exercise of his talents.
[Illustration]
Colonel Bangs affords me most entertainment in the _Argus_ when an
election is approaching.
Your city editor often displays a certain amount of vehemence at such
times, but his wildest frenzy is calmness, is absolute slumberous repose
itself, when compared with the frantic enthusiasm manifested by Colonel
Bangs. The latter succeeds in getting up as much fury over a candidate
for constable as a city editor does over an aspirant for the Presidency.
He will turn out column after column of double-leaded type, in which he
will demonstrate with a marvelous profusion of adjectives that if you
should roll all the prophets, saints and martyrs into one, you would
have a much smaller amount of virtue than can be found in that one
humble man who wants to be constable. He will prove to you that unless
that particular person is elected, the entire fabric of American
institutions will totter to its base and become a bewildering and
hopeless ruin, while the merciless despots who grind enslaved millions
beneath their iron heels will greet the hideous and irreclaimable chaos
with fiendish laughter, and amid the remnants of a once proud republic
they will erect bastiles in which they will forge chains to fetter the
wrists of dismayed and heart-broken patriots. He will ask you to take
your choice between electing that man constable and witnessing the
annihilation of the proud work for which the Revolutionary patriots bled
and died.
The man who runs against the candidate of the _Argus_ will be proved to
be a moral and intellectual wreck, and it will be shown that all the
vices which have corrupted the race since the fall of man are
concentrated in that one individual. The day after election, if his man
wins, Colonel Bangs will decorate his paper with a whole array of
roosters and a menagerie of 'coons, and inform a breathless world that
the nation is once more saved. If he loses, he will omit any reference
to the frightful prophecies uttered during the campaign, keep his
roosters in the closet, and mildly assert that the opposition man is not
so bad, after all, and that the right party must triumph next time for
certain. Then Colonel Bangs will keep his enthusiasm cool for a year,
and during that period will rest his overwrought brain, while he edits
his paper with a pair of predatory shears and a dishonest paste-pot.
* * * * *
It is extremely probable that we shall lose our servant-girl. She was
the victim of a very singular catastrophe a night or two since, in
consequence of which she has acquired a prejudice against the house of
Adeler. We were troubled with dampness in our cellar, and in order to
remove the difficulty we got a couple of men to come and dig the earth
out to the depth of twelve or fifteen inches and fill it in with a
cement-and-mortar floor. The material was, of course, very soft, and the
workmen laid boards upon the surface, so that access to the furnace and
the coal-bin was possible. That night, just after retiring, we heard a
woman screaming for help, but after listening at the open window, we
concluded that Cooley and his wife were engaged in an altercation, and
so we paid no more attention to the noise. Half an hour afterward there
was a violent ring at the front-door bell, and upon going to the window
again, I found Pitman standing upon the door-step below. When I spoke to
him, he said:
"Max" (the judge is inclined sometimes, especially during periods of
excitement, to be unnecessarily familiar), "there's somethin' wrong in
your cellar. There's a woman down there screechin' and carryin' on like
mad. Sounds 's if somebody's a-murderin' her."
[Illustration]
I dressed and descended; and securing the assistance of Pitman, so that
I would be better prepared in the event of burglars being discovered, I
lighted a lamp and we went into the cellar.
[Illustration]
There we found the maid-servant standing by the refrigerator, knee-deep
in the cement, and supporting herself with the handle of a broom, which
was also half submerged. In several places about her were air-holes
marking the spot where the milk-jug, the cold veal, the lima beans and
the silver-plated butter-dish had gone down. We procured some additional
boards, and while Pitman seized the sufferer by one arm I grasped the
other. It was for some time doubtful if she would come to the surface
without the use of more violent means, and I confess that I was half
inclined to regard with satisfaction the prospect that we would have to
blast her loose with gunpowder. After a desperate struggle, during which
the girl declared that she would be torn in pieces, Pitman and I
succeeded in getting her safely out, and she went up stairs with half a
barrel of cement on each leg, declaring that she would leave the house
in the morning.
[Illustration]
[Illustration]
[Illustration]
The cold veal is in there yet. Centuries hence some antiquarian will
perhaps grub about the spot whereon my cottage once stood, and will blow
that cold veal out in a petrified condition, and then present it to a
museum as the fossil remains of some unknown animal. Perhaps, too, he
will excavate the milk-jug and the butter-dish, and go about lecturing
upon them as utensils employed in bygone ages by a race of savages
called "the Adelers." I should like to be alive at the time to hear that
lecture. And I cannot avoid the thought that if our servant had been
completely buried in the cement, and thus carefully preserved until the
coming of that antiquarian, the lecture would be more interesting, and
the girl more useful than she is now. A fossilized domestic servant of
the present era would probably astonish the people of the twenty-eighth
century.
* * * * *
"I see," said Mrs. Adeler, who was looking over the evening paper upon
the day following the accident, "that Mlle. Willson, the opera-singer,
has been robbed of ten thousand dollars' worth of diamonds in St. Louis.
What a dreadful loss!"
"Dreadful, indeed, Mrs. A. These singing women are very unfortunate.
They are constantly being robbed, or rolled over embankments in railway
cars, or subjected to deadly perils in some other form; and the
astonishing thing about it all is that these frightful things invariably
occur precisely at the times when public interest in the victims begins
to flag a little, and the accounts always appear in the papers of a
certain city just before the singers begin an engagement in that place.
It is very remarkable."
"You don't think this story is false, do you, and that all such
statements are untrue?"
"Certainly not. I only refer to the fact because it shows how very
wonderful coincidences often are. I have observed precisely the same
thing in connection with other contributors to popular entertainment.
But in these cases sometimes we may trace the effects directly to the
cause. Take menageries, for example. The peculiar manifestations which
frequently attend the movements of these collections of wild animals
through the land can be attributed only to the wonderful instinct of the
beasts. If I am to judge from the reports that appear occasionally in
the provincial newspapers, it invariably happens that the animals come
to the rescue of the menagerie people when the latter begin their
campaigns and are badly in want of advertisements for which they are
disinclined to pay."
[Illustration]
[Illustration]
"Regularly every season these ferocious beasts proceed to do something
to secure sensational allusions to themselves in the papers. If the
rhinoceros does not plunge through the side of the tent and prowl about
until he comes home with an entire Sunday-school class of small boys
impaled on his horn, the Nubian lion is perfectly certain to bite its
keeper in half and lunch upon his legs. If the elephant should neglect
to seize his attendant and fling him into the parquet circle, while at
the same time it crushes the hyena into jelly, the Bengal tiger is very
sure not to forget to tear half a dozen ribs out of the ticket agent,
and then to assimilate ten or twelve village children who are trying
to peep under the tent. Either the brass band, riding upon the den of
lions, finds the roof caving in, and at last is rescued with the loss
of the cymbal player and the operator upon the key bugle, and of a lot
of legs and arms snatched from the bass drummer and the man with the
triangle, or else there is a railroad accident which empties the cars
and permits kangaroos, panthers, blue-nose baboons and boa-constrictors
to roam about the country reducing the majorities of the afflicted
sections previous to the election."
"You may find hundreds of accounts of such accidents in the rural press
during the summer season; and whenever I read them, I am at a loss to
determine which is more wonderful, the remarkable sagacity and the
self-sacrificing devotion of these beasts, which perceive that something
must be done and straightway do it, or the childlike confidence, the
bland simplicity, of the editors who give gratuitous circulation to
these narratives."
"Talking about menageries," observed Mr. Bob Parker, "did I ever tell
you about Wylie and his love affair?"
"No."
"Wylie, you know, was the brother of the porter in our store; and when
he had nothing to do, he used to come around and sit in the cellar among
the boxes and bales, and we fellows would go down when we were at
leisure and hear him relate his adventures.
"One time, several years ago, he was awfully hard up and he accepted a
situation in a traveling show. They dressed him up in a fur shirt and
put grizzly bears' claws on his feet and daubed some stuff over his
face, and advertised him as 'The Wild Man of Afghanistan.' Then, when
the show was open, he would stand in a cage and scrouge up against the
bars and growl until he would scare the children nearly to death. The
fat woman used to sit near him during the exhibitions just outside the
cage, and by degrees he learned to love her. The keeper of the concern
himself, it appears, also cherished a tender feeling for the corpulent
young creature, and he became jealous of the Wild Man of Afghanistan."
"And the professor of avoirdupois--whom did she affect?"
"Well, when the visitors came, the keeper would procure a pole with a
nail in the end, and he would stir up the Wild Man and poke him. Then
he would ridicule the Wild Man's legs and deliver lectures upon the
manner in which he turned in his toes; and he sometimes read to the
audience chapters out of books of natural history to show that a being
with a skull of such a shape must necessarily be an idiot. Then he would
poke the Wild Man of Afghanistan a few more times with the pole and pass
on to the next cage with some remarks tending to prove that the monkeys
therein and the Wild Man were of the same general type."
[Illustration]
[Illustration]
"And all the time the fat woman would sit there and smile a cold and
disdainful smile, as if she believed it all, and hated such legs and
despised toes that turned in. At last the Wild Man of Afghanistan had
his revenge. One day when all hands were off duty, the keeper fell
asleep on the settee in the ticket-office adjoining the show-room. Then
Mr. Wylie threw a blanket over him and went for the fat woman. He led
her by the hand and asked her to be seated while he told her about his
love. Then she suddenly sat down on the keeper."
[Illustration]
"And killed him, I suppose, of course?"
[Illustration]
"Wylie informed me that you could have passed the remains under a closed
door without scraping the buttons of the waistcoat. They merely slid him
into a crack in the ground when they buried him, and the fat woman pined
away until she became thin and valueless. Then the Wild Man married her,
and began life again on a new basis."
[Illustration]
"Was Mr. Wylie what you might consider a man of veracity?"
"Certainly he was; and his story is undoubtedly true, because his toes
did turn in."
"That settles the matter. With such incontrovertible evidence as that at
hand, it would be folly to doubt the story. We will go quietly and
confidently to tea instead of discussing it."
[Illustration]