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Title: The Wit and Humor of America, Volume VII. (of X.)

Author: Various

Editor: Marshall P. Wilder

Release Date: September 18, 2006 [EBook #19325]

Language: English

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Library Edition

THE WIT AND HUMOR OF AMERICA

In Ten Volumes

VOL. VII

GEORGE ADE

THE WIT AND HUMOR OF AMERICA

EDITED BY MARSHALL P. WILDER

Volume VII

Funk & Wagnalls Company
New York and London

Copyright MDCCCCVII, BOBBS-MERRILL COMPANY
Copyright MDCCCCXI, THE THWING COMPANY

CONTENTS

COMPLETE INDEX AT THE END OF VOLUME X.

[Pg 1217]

BREITMANN AND THE TURNERS

BY CHARLES GODFREY LELAND

CUPID, A CROOK

BY EDWARD W. TOWNSEND

The first night assignment Francis Holt received from his city editor was in these words: "Mr. Holt, you will cover the Tenderloin to-night. Mr. Fetner, who usually covers it, will explain what there is to do."

Fetner, when his own work was done that night, sought Holt to help him with any late story which might be troublesome to a new man. They were walking up Broadway when Fetner, lowering his voice, said: "Here's Duane, a plain-clothes man, who is useful to us. I'll introduce you."

As the reporters, in the full flood of after-theater crowds, stood talking to the officer, a young man hurrying past abruptly stopped and stepped to Duane's side.

"Well, Tommy, what's up with you?" the officer asked. Holt noted that Tommy, besides being breathed, was excited. His coat and hat had the provisional look of the apparel of house servants out of livery, and his trousers belonged to a livery suit. Tommy hesitated, glancing at Duane's companions, but the officer said: "Tell your story: these are friends of mine."

"I was just on my way to the station house to see the captain, but I'm glad I met you, for we don't want the papers to say anything, and there's always reporters around the station."

Holt would have stepped back, but Fetner detained him, while Duane said cheerfully: "You're a cunning one, Tommy. Now, what's wrong?"[Pg 1221]

"Well," began the youth in the manner of a witness on the stand, "I was on duty in the hall this evening and noticed one of our tenants, Mr. Porter H. Carrington, leave the house about ten o'clock. I noticed that he had no overcoat, which I thought was queer, for I'd just closed the front door, because it was getting chilly."

At the mention of the name Holt started, and now paid close attention to the story.

"I was reading the sporting extra by the hall light," Tommy continued, "when, in about twenty minutes, Mr. Carrington returned—that is, I thought it was Mr. Carrington—and he says to me, 'Tommy, run up to my dressing-room and fetch my overcoat.' 'Yes, sir,' I says; 'which one?' for he has a dozen of 'em. 'The light one I wore to-day,' he says, and I starts up the stairs, his apartment being on the next floor, thinking I'd see the coat he wanted on a chair if he'd worn it to-day. I'd just got to his hall and was unlocking the door, when he comes up behind me and says, 'I'll get it, Tommy; there's something else I want.' So in he goes, handing me a dime, and I goes back to the hall. In about fifteen minutes he comes downstairs wearing an overcoat and carrying a bundle, tosses me the key and starts for the door. He's the kind that never carries a bundle, so I says to him, 'Shall I ring for a messenger to carry your package?' 'No,' says he, and leaves the house."

Tommy paused, and there was a shake of excitement in his voice when he resumed: "In five minutes Mr. Carrington comes back without any overcoat, and says, Tommy, run upstairs and get me an overcoat.' I looks, and he was as sober as I am at this minute, Mr. Duane, and I begins to feel queer. It sort of comes over me all of a sudden that the voice of the other man I'd unlocked the door for was different from this one. But I'd been[Pg 1222] reading the baseball news, and didn't notice much at the time. So I says, hoping it was some kind of a jolly, 'Did you lose the one you just wore out, sir?' 'I wore no coat,' he says, giving me a look. Well, he goes to his apartment, me after him, and there was things flung all over the place, and all the signs of a hurry job by a sneak-thief. Mr. Carrington was kind of petrified, but I runs downstairs and tells the superintendent, and he chases me off to the station. The superintendent was mad and rags me good, for there never was a job of that kind done in the house. But the other man was the same looking as the real, so how was I to know?"

Duane started off with Tommy, and winked to the reporters to follow. At the Quadrangle, a bachelor apartment house noted for its high rents and exclusiveness, Duane was met at the entrance by the superintendent, who told the officer that there was nothing in the story, after all. It was a lark of a friend of his, Mr. Carrington had said, and was annoyed that news of the affair had been sent to the police. The superintendent was glad that Tommy had not reached the station house. Duane looked inquiringly at the superintendent, who gravely winked.

"Good night," said Duane, holding out his hand. "Good night," replied the other, taking the hand. "You won't report this at the station?" "No," said Duane, who then put his hand in his pocket and returned to the reporters. He told them what the superintendent had said.

"What do you make out of it?" asked Fetner.

"Nothing," the officer replied. "If I tried to make out the cases we are asked not to investigate, I'd have mighty little time to work on the cases we are wanted in. If Mr. Carrington says he hasn't been robbed, it isn't our business to prove that he has been. You won't print anything about this?"[Pg 1223]

Fetner said he would not. To have done so after that promise would have closed a fruitful source of Tenderloin stories. The reporters left the officer at Broadway and resumed their interrupted walk to supper. "Lots of funny things happen in the Tenderloin," Fetner remarked, in the manner of one dismissing a subject.

"But," exclaimed Holt, quite as excited as Tommy had been, "I know Carrington."

"So does every one," answered Fetner, "by name and reputation. He's just a swell—swell enough to be noted. Isn't that all?"

"He was a couple of classes ahead of me at college," continued Holt. "I didn't know him there—one doesn't know half of one's own class—but his family and mine are old friends, and without troubling himself to know me, more than to nod, he sometimes sent me word to use his horses when he was away. Before I left college and went to work on a Boston paper, Carrington started on a trip around the world. My people heard of him through his people at times, and learned that he was doing a number of crazy things, among them getting lost in all sorts of No-man's-lands. His people were usually asking the State Department to locate him, through the diplomatic and consular services."

"Then this is one of his eccentricities," commented Fetner.

"How can you treat it like that?" exclaimed Holt. "I think it is a fascinating mystery, and I'm going to solve it."

"Not for publication," warned Fetner.

"For my own satisfaction," declared Holt, with great earnestness.

When the superintendent of the Quadrangle had shaken[Pg 1224] hands with the officer he turned to Tommy and said: "You go up to Mr. Carrington. He wants to see you."

"Tommy," said Mr. Carrington, "I think this is a joke on you."

This view of the event was such a relief to Tommy that he grinned broadly.

"It is certainly a joke on you. Now, Thomas, did my friend make himself up to look so much like me that you could not have told the difference, even if you were not distracted by the discomfiture of the New York nine this season?"

"I can't say how much he looked like you, and how much he didn't. I naturally thought he was you—that's all."

"Not all, Thomas: nothing is all. He asked in an easy, nice voice for a coat, so you thought he was somebody who had a coat here. How did you know whose coat he preferred?"

"Because I thought he was you."

"If I had not been the last tenant to leave the house before that, would you have thought so? If Mr. Hopkins had just left, and that man had come in and asked for 'My coat,' wouldn't you have got Mr. Hopkins' coat?"

"Mr. Hopkins did go out after you," Tommy admitted, reluctantly.

"Oh, he did, eh? Well, Hopkins is always going out. I never knew such a regular out-and-outer as Hopkins. He should reform. It's a joke on you, Thomas, and if I were you I wouldn't say anything about it."

"I ain't going to say anything," declared Tommy. "If I don't lose my job for it, I'll be lucky."

"I'll see that you do not lose your job. What police did you see?"

"Only a plain-clothes man I know, and a couple of his[Pg 1225] side-partners. They won't say anything, for the superintendent fixed them."

Mr. Carrington secured his college degree a year after his class. The delay resulted from an occurrence which he never admitted deserved a year's rustication. By mere chance he had learned the date of the birthday of one of the least known and least important instructors, and decided that it would be well to celebrate it. So he made the acquaintance of the instructor and invited him to a birthday dinner. A large and exultant company were the instructor's fellow guests at the St. Dunstan, and there was jollity that seemed out of drawing with the dominant lines of the guest of honor; yet the scope of the celebration was extended until it included the burning of much red fire and explosion of many noisy bombs at a late hour, as the instructor was making a speech of thanks in the yard, surrounded by the dinner guests, heartily encouraging him. It seemed that upon the manner in which the affair was to be presented to the Faculty depended the dismissal of the instructor or the rustication of Mr. Carrington; and the latter managed to present the case so as to save the instructor. If he had foreseen all the consequences of taking all the blame for an occurrence promptly distorted in report into the aspect of a riotous carousal, perhaps Mr. Carrington would not have sacrificed himself for a neutral personality which had so recently swum into his ken. One consequence was a letter from Mr. Draper Curtis, of New York, commanding Mr. Carrington to cease correspondence with Miss Caroline Curtis; and a note from Caroline, in which a calmer man than a distracted lover would have seen signs of parental censorship, wherein that young lady said that she had read her father's letter and added her commands to his. She had[Pg 1226] heard from many sources, as had numerous indignant relatives and friends, the particulars of the shocking affair which had compelled the Faculty to discipline Mr. Carrington; and she could but agree with her family that her happiness would rest upon insecure ground if trusted to the inciter and principal offender in such a terrible transaction. He was to forget her at once, as she would try to forget him.

Caroline and her mamma sailed for Europe the next day, and several letters Carrington wrote to her, giving a less censurable version of the little dinner to the little instructor, were returned to him unopened.

After receiving his delayed degree Carrington began a tour around the world. In the court of the Palace Hotel, the day of his departure from San Francisco, a commonplace-looking man stepped up to him briskly, and said, placing a hand on his shoulder: "Presidio, you've got a nerve to come back here. You, to the ferry; or with me to the captain!"

Carrington turned his full face toward the man for the first time as he brushed aside the hand with some force. The man reddened, blinked, and then stammered: "Excuse me, but you did look so—Say, you must excuse me, for I see that you are a gentleman."

"Isn't Presidio a gentleman?" Carrington asked, good-naturedly, when he saw that the man's confusion was genuine.

"Why, Presidio is—do you mind sitting down at one of these tables? I feel a little shaky—making such a break!"

He explained that he was the hotel's detective, and had been on the city's police force. In both places he had dealings with a confidence man, called Presidio—after the part of the city he came from. Presidio was an odd lot; had[Pg 1227] enough skill in several occupations to earn honest wages, but seemed unable to forego the pleasure of exercising his wit in confidence games and sneak-thievery. Among his honest accomplishments was the ability to perform sleight-of-hand tricks well enough to work profitably in the lesser theater circuits. He had married a woman who made part of the show Presidio operated for a time—a good-looking woman, but as ready to turn a confidence trick as to help her husband's stage work, or do a song and dance as an interlude. They had been warned to leave San Francisco for a year, and not to return then, unless bringing proof that they had walked in moral paths during their exile.

"And you mistook me for Presidio?" asked Carrington, with the manner of one flattered.

"For a second, and seeing only your side face. Of course, I saw my mistake when you turned and spoke to me. Presidio is considered the best-looking crook we've ever had."

"Now, that's nice! Where did you say he's gone?"

"I don't know."

Carrington found that out for himself. He first interrupted his voyage by a stop of some weeks in Japan. Later, at the Oriental Hotel in Manila, the day of his arrival there, he saw a man observing him with smiling interest, a kind of smile and interest which prompted Carrington to smile in return. He was bored because the only officer he knew in the Philippines was absent from Manila on an expedition to the interior; and the man who smiled looked as if he might scatter the blues if he were permitted to try. The stranger approached with a bright, frank look, and said, "Don't you remember me, Mr. Carrington?"

"No-o."[Pg 1228]

"I was head waiter at the St. Dunstan."

"Oh, were you? Well, your face has a familiar look, somehow."

"Excuse my speaking to you, but I guess your last trip was what induced me to come out here."

"That's odd."

"It is sort of funny. I'd saved a good deal—I'm the saving sort—and the tenner you gave me that night—you remember, the night of the dinner—happened to fetch my pile up to exactly five hundred. So I says to myself that here was my chance to make a break for freedom—independence, you understand."

"We're the very deuce for independence down our way."

"Yes, indeed, sir. I was awfully sorry to hear about the trouble you got in at college; but, if you don't mind my saying so now, you boys were going it a little that night."

"Going it? What night? There were several."

"The red-fire night. You tipped me ten for that dinner."

"Did I? I hope you have it yet, Mr.—"

"James Wilkins, sir. Did you see Mr. Thorpe and Mr. Culver as you passed through San Francisco?"

"I did. How did you happen to know that I knew them?"

"I remember that they were chums of yours at college. We heard lots of college gossip at St. Dunstan's. I called on them in San Francisco, and Mr. Thorpe got me half-fare rates here. I've opened a restaurant here, and am doing a good business. Some of the officers who knew me at the St. Dunstan kind of made my place fashionable. Lieutenant Sommers, of the cavalry, won't dine anywhere else."[Pg 1229]

"Sommers? I expected to find him here."

"He's just gone out with an expedition. He told me that you'd be along, and that I was to see that you didn't starve. I've named my place the St. Dunstan, and I'd like you to call there—I remember your favorite dishes."

"That's very decent of you."

Mr. Wilkins looked frequently toward the entrance, with seeming anxiety. "I wish the proprietor of this place would come in," he said at last. "Lieutenant Sommers left me a check on this house for a hundred—Mr. Sommers roomed here, and left his money with the office. I need the cash to pay a carpenter who has built an addition for me. Kind of funny to be worth not a cent less than five thousand gold, in stock and good will, and be pushed for a hundred cash."

"If you've Mr. Sommers' check, I'll let you have the money—for St. Dunstan's sake."

"If you could? Of course, you know the lieutenant's signature?"

"As well as my own. Quite right. Here you are. Where is your restaurant?"

"You cross the Lunette, turn toward the bay—ask anybody. Hope to see you soon. Good day."

Some officers called on Carrington, as they had been told to do by the absent Sommers. When introductions were over, one of them handed a paper to Carrington, saying gravely: "Sommers told me to give this to you. It was published in San Francisco the day after you left, and reached here while you were in Japan."

What Carrington saw was a San Francisco newspaper story of his encounter with the Palace Hotel detective, an account of his famous dinner at the St. Dunstan, some selections of his other college pranks, allusion to the fact that he was a classmate of two San Franciscans, Messrs.[Pg 1230] Thorpe and Culver, the whole illustrated with pictures of Carrington and Presidio—the latter taken from the rogues' gallery. "Very pretty, very pretty, indeed," murmured Carrington, his eyes lingering with thoughtful pause on the picture of Presidio. "Could we not celebrate my fame in some place of refreshment—the St. Dunstan, for instance?"

They knew of no St. Dunstan's.

"I foreboded it," sighed Carrington. He narrated his recent experience with one James Wilkins, "who, I now opine, is Mr. Presidio. It's not worth troubling the police about, but I'd give a pretty penny to see Mr. Presidio again. Not to reprove him for the error of his ways, but to discover the resemblance which has led to this winsome newspaper story."

The next day one of the officers told Carrington that he had learned that Presidio and his wife, known to the police by a number of names, had taken ship the afternoon before.

"I see," remarked Carrington. "He needed exactly my tip to move to new fields. He worked me from the article in the paper, which he had seen and I had not. Clever Presidio!"

When Tommy, the hall-boy, on the night of Mr. Holt's first Tenderloin assignment, went to inform the police, Carrington, looking about the apartment to discover the extent of his loss, found on a table a letter superinscribed, "Before sending for the police, read this." He read:

"Dear Mr. Carrington: Since we met in Manila I have been to about every country on top of the earth where a white man's show could be worked. It's been up and down, and down and up, the last turn being down. In India I got some sleight-of-hand tricks which are new to[Pg 1231] this country; but here we land, wife and me, broke. Nothing but our apparatus, which we can't eat; and not able to use it, because we are shy on dress clothes demanded by the houses where I could get engagements. In that condition I happened to see you on the street, and thought to try a touch; and would, but you might be sore over the little fun we had in Manila. I heard in South Africa that you wouldn't let the army officers start the police after me; and wife says that was as square a deal as she ever heard of, and to try a touch. But I says we will make a forced loan, and repay out of our salaries. We hocked our apparatus to get me a suit of clothes which looked something like those you wear, and the rest was easy: finding out Tommy's name and then conning him. I've taken some clothes and jewelry, to make a front at the booking office, and some cash. You should empty your pockets of loose cash: I found some in all your clothes. Give me and wife a chance, and we will live straight after this, and remit on instalment. You can get me pinched easy, for we'll be playing the continuous circuit in a week; but wife says you won't squeal, and I'll take chances. Yours, sincerely as always, Presidio."

So Carrington told the superintendent to drop the matter.

The Great Courvatals, Monsieur and Madame, showed their new tricks to the booking agent and secured a forty weeks' engagement at a salary which only Presidio's confidence could have asked.

Presidio liked New York, and exploited it in as many directions as possible. With his new fashionable clothing and his handsome face, he was admitted to resorts of a character his boldest dreams had never before penetrated. He especially liked the fine restaurants. None so jocund, so frank and free as Presidio in ordering the best at the[Pg 1232] best places. Mrs. Presidio did not accompany him; she was enjoying the more poignant pleasure of shopping, with a responsible theater manager as her reference! At a restaurant one midday, as Presidio was leisurely breakfasting, he became aware that he was the object of furtive observation by a young lady, seated with an elderly companion at a table somewhat removed. Furtive doings were in his line, and he made a close study of the party, never turning more than a scant half-face to do so. The manner of the young lady was puzzling. None so keen as Presidio in reading expression, but hers he could not understand. That she was not trying to flirt with him he decided promptly and definitively; yet her looks were intended to attract his attention, and to do so secretly. The elderly companion, when the couple was leaving the restaurant, stopped in the vestibule to allow an attendant to adjust her wrap, and Presidio seized that chance to pass close to the young lady, moving as slowly as he dared without seeming to be concerned in her actions. Her head was averted, but Presidio distinctly heard her breathe, rather than whisper, "Pass by the house to-morrow afternoon."

Presidio pondered. He was supposed to know where her house was; he was unwelcome to some one there; he was mistaken for some one else—Carrington!

When he told his wife about it she was in a fever of romantic excitement. Bruising knocks in the world, close approaches to the shades of the prison house, hardships which would have banished romance from a nature less robustly romantic, had for Mrs. Presidio but more glowingly suffused with the tints of romance all life—but her own! "Mr. Carrington has done us right, Willie," she declared; "once in Manila, when we simply had to get to[Pg 1233] Hong Kong; and here, where we wouldn't have had no show on earth if he hadn't lent you the clothes and cash for the start. There's something doing here, Willie; and I'm all lit up with excitement."

Presidio, who, of course, had followed the young lady to learn where she lived, passed the house the next day, the sedatest looking man on the sedate block. Presently a maid came from the house, gave him a beckoning nod, and hurried on round the corner. There she slipped him a note, saying as she walked on, "I was to give you this, Mr. Carrington."

Presidio took the note to his wife, and she declared for opening it. It was sealed, and addressed to another person; but to let such an informality as opening another's letters stand in the way of knowing what was going on around them would have been foreign to the nature of Presidio activities. This was the note:

Mrs. Presidio wept. Here was romance sadder, and[Pg 1234] therefore better, than any she had ever read; better, even, than that in the one-act dramas which followed their turns on the stage. "Have you ever studied his writing?" she asked her husband; and, promptly divining her plan, he replied, "I made a few copies of his signature on the Manila hotel register. You never know what will turn up." After a pause, he added eagerly, "Better yet!—there was some of his writing in the overcoat I borrowed from his rooms."

"Write to her; make an appointment, and have him on hand to keep it."

Here was work right in Presidio's line; his professional pride was fired, and he wrote with grave application:

"That's beautiful!" declared Mrs. Presidio, looking over Willie's shoulder. He continued:

This was all written in a good imitation of Carrington's rather unusual handwriting, and approved by Mrs. Presidio; who, however, thought there should be some reference to the young lady's home as a beetled tower, and to her father as several things which Presidio feared[Pg 1235] might not be esteemed polite in the social plane they were operating in. He passed the house the next day, and the maid soon appeared. He learned from her that her mistress's companion was not at home; and then, hopeful because of this opportune absence, hurried off, leaving Mrs. Presidio round the corner in a carriage. He went to a club where, he had ascertained, Carrington usually was at that hour, and sent in the card of "M. Courvatal," on which he wrote, "Presidio." Carrington came out to him at once. "My dear Mr. Presidio, this is so kind of you," he said, regarding his caller with interest. "We've not met since Manila. I hope Mrs. Presidio is well, and that your professional engagements prosper. I went to see you perform last night, and was delighted."

"Thank you," the caller said, much pleased with this reception. "I'll be sending the balance of my little debt to you as soon as the wife has her dressmaking bills settled."

"Pray do not incommode the wife. The amount you have already sent was a pleasant—surprise. Can I be of any service to you to-day?"

"Well, it's like this, Mr. Carrington: I have an appointment for you this afternoon."

"For me?"

"With Miss Caroline Curtis."

"What do you mean?"

"Don't be offended, sir. Come with me, and see what you'll see. If I try any game, pitch into me, that's all."

The man's manner was now so earnest that Carrington, without a word, started with him. In the club entrance Presidio whispered, "Follow; don't walk with me. There's not much chance that any one here will recognize me, but if I was pinched on any old score you'd better not be in my company." He went ahead, and Carrington fol[Pg 1236]lowed. They had walked down Fifth Avenue several blocks when Mr. Francis Holt cut in between them, and shadowed Presidio with elaborate caution. Carrington saw this, and mused. "I think I know that young man who has so plainly got friend Presidio under observation. Surely, it's Holt, a year or two after me. What can he—Hello, I say!"

Holt saw the intention of Presidio to turn off the avenue toward a little church round the corner, and advancing suddenly, laid a strong hand on Presidio's shoulder, saying, "Come quietly with me, and I'll make no fuss; but if you don't, I'll call a policeman."

Carrington overtook them. Holt was excited, wild-eyed, disheveled, and seemed not to have slept for a week. Presidio coolly awaited events.

"Hello, Holt!" exclaimed Carrington. "How are you, old chap? Haven't seen you for years."

"Good heavens, this is lucky!" cried Holt. "Carrington, since the night your rooms were plundered I've been on the track of this villain. I was bound to explain the mystery of that night; determined to prove that I could unravel a plot, detect a crime! Do you understand? This is the fellow who rifled your room. Robbed you!"

"Yes, I know, old fellow," Carrington replied soothingly, for he saw that Holt was half hysterical from excitement. "He's always robbing me, this chap is. It's a habit with him. I've come rather to like it. Walk along with us, and I'll tell you all about it."

They turned the corner and walked down the side street, but only Holt talked: of his sleepless nights and tireless days solving his first crime case. A carriage drove up to the curb and Mrs. Presidio stepped out. At a wink from Presidio Carrington stepped in.

"Betty," said Presidio to his wife, "shake hands with[Pg 1237] an old friend of mine and of Mr. Carrington's. I want you to know him. Mr. Holt, shake hands with Madame Courvatal, my wife."

"Why, Mr. Holt, glad to meet you personally!" exclaimed Betty. "This is the gent, Willie, I've told you about: comes to the show every night just before our turn, and goes out as soon as we are off."

"Glad you like the turn so much," Presidio said, smiling oddly. Holt, with his hand to his brow was gasping. The carriage door opened and Carrington's head emerged: "Oh, Holt, come here."

Holt, with a painfully dazed expression, went to the carriage. "My dear," Carrington said to some one inside who was struggling to hide, "this is Mr. Francis Holt; one of my oldest and dearest friends. He's the discreetest fellow I know and will arrange the whole matter in a minute. You must, darling! Fate has offered us a chance for life's happiness, and as I say—Holt, like a good fellow, go into the parsonage and explain who I am, and who Miss Caroline Curtis is. Your people know all the Curtises, and we're going to get married, and—don't protest, darling!—like a good chap, Holt, go and—for God's sake, man, don't stare like that! You know us, and can vouch for us. Tell the parson that the Curtises and Carringtons are always marrying each other. Holt! will you move?"

An hour later a little banquet was served in the private dining-room of a hotel, and Mrs. Carrington was explaining, between tears and laughter, how good, kind Madame Courvatal had told her that everything was ready for a wedding, and that she would be a cruel woman, indeed, not to make such a loving lover happy; and she couldn't make up her mind to say yes, and it was hard to say no—just after receiving Porter's despairing note.[Pg 1238]

"My note, dear?" asked Carrington, but Presidio coughed so loudly she did not hear her husband's question. Holt drank to the bride and groom several times before he began soberly to believe he was not in a dream. Mr. and Mrs. Presidio beamed broadly, and declared that life without romance was no kind of a life for honest folk to live.

"Holt!" exclaimed Carrington, when the train carriage was announced, "you've been a brick about all this. I don't know how to show my appreciation."

"I'll tell you how," suggested Presidio. "Let Mr. Holt be the one to tell Mr. Curtis. He deserves the privilege of informing the governor."

"The very thing, Holt, old chap!" cried Carrington. "Will you do it?"

"You're awfully kind," answered Holt, "but I think this old friend could do it with more art and understanding."

"What, my Willie?" cried Willie's wife. "He'll do it to the Queen's taste. Won't you, Willie?"

"I will, in company with Mr. Holt—my friend and your admirer. He sits in front every night," he added, in explanation to Carrington.

As the carriage with the happy pair drove away to the station, Presidio, with compulsive ardor, took the arm of Mr. Francis Holt; and together they marched up the avenue to inform Mr. Curtis of the marriage of his daughter.[Pg 1239]

TWO CASES OF GRIP

BY M. QUAD

"What's this! What's this!" exclaimed Mr. Bowser, as he came home the other evening and found Mrs. Bowser lying on the sofa and looking very much distressed.

"The doctor says it's the grip—a second attack," she explained. "I was taken with a chill and headache about noon and—"

"Grip? Second attack? That's all nonsense, Mrs. Bowser! Nobody can have the grip a second time."

"But the doctor says so."

"Then the doctor is an idiot, and I'll tell him so to his face. I know what's the matter with you. You've been walking around the backyard barefoot or doing some other foolish thing. I expected it, however. No woman is happy unless she's flat down about half the time. How on earth any of your sex manage to live to be twenty years old is a mystery to me. The average woman has no more sense than a rag baby."

"I haven't been careless," she replied.

"I know better! Of course you have! If you hadn't been you wouldn't be where you are. Grip be hanged! Well, it's only right that you should suffer for it. Call it what you wish, but don't expect any sympathy from me. While I use every precaution to preserve my health, you go sloshing around in your bare feet, or sit on a cake of ice to read a dime novel, or do some other tomfool[Pg 1240] thing to flatten you out. I refuse to sympathize with you, Mrs. Bowser—absolutely and teetotally refuse to utter one word of pity."

Mrs. Bowser had nothing to say in reply. Mr. Bowser ate his dinner alone, took advantage of the occasion to drive a few nails and make a great noise, and by and by went off to his club and was gone until midnight. Next morning Mrs. Bowser felt a bit better and made a heroic attempt to be about until he started for the office.

The only reference he made to her illness was to say:

"If you live to be three hundred years old, you may possibly learn something about the laws of health and be able to keep out of bed three days in a week."

Mrs. Bowser was all right at the end of three or four days, and nothing more was said. Then one afternoon at three o'clock a carriage drove up and a stranger assisted Mr. Bowser into the house. He was looking pale and ghastly, and his chin quivered, and his knees wabbled.

"What is it, Mr. Bowser?" she exclaimed, as she met him at the door.

"Bed—doctor—death!" he gasped in reply.

Mrs. Bowser got him to bed and examined him for bullet holes or knife wounds. There were none. He had no broken limbs. He hadn't fallen off a horse or been half drowned. When she had satisfied herself on these points, she asked:

"How were you taken?"

"W-with a c-chill!" he gasped—"with a c-chill and a b-backache!"

"I thought so. Mr. Bowser, you have the grip—a second attack. As I have some medicine left, there's no need to send for the doctor. I'll have you all right in a day or two."

"Get the doctor at once," wailed Mr. Bowser, "or I'm[Pg 1241] a dead man! Such a backache! So cold! Mrs. Bowser, if I should d-die, I hope—"

Emotion overcame Mr. Bowser, and he could say no more. The doctor came and pronounced it a second attack of the grip, but a very mild one. When he had departed, Mrs. Bowser didn't accuse Mr. Bowser with putting on his summer flannels a month too soon; with forgetting his umbrella and getting soaked through; with leaving his rubbers at home and having damp feet all day. She didn't express her wonder that he hadn't died years ago, nor predict that when he reached the age of Methuselah he would know better than to roll in snow-banks or stand around in mud puddles. She didn't kick over chairs or slam doors or leave him alone. When Mr. Bowser shed tears, she wiped them away. When he moaned, she held his hand. When he said he felt that the grim specter was near, and wanted to kiss the baby good-by, she cheered him with the prediction that he would be a great deal better next day.

Mr. Bowser didn't get up next day, though the doctor said he could. He lay in bed and sighed and uttered sorrowful moans and groans. He wanted toast and preserves; he had to have help to turn over; he worried about a relapse; he had to have a damp cloth on his forehead; he wanted to have a council of doctors, and he read the copy of his last will and testament over three times.

Mr. Bowser was all right next morning, however. When Mrs. Bowser asked him how he felt he replied:

"How do I feel? Why, as right as a trivet, of course. When a man takes the care of himself that I do—when he has the nerve and will power I have—he can throw off 'most anything. You would have died, Mrs. Bowser; but I was scarcely affected. It was just a play spell. I'd like to be real sick once just to see how it would seem.[Pg 1242] Cholera, I suppose it was; but outside of feeling a little tired, I wasn't at all affected."

And the dutiful Mrs. Bowser looked at him and swallowed it all and never said a word to hurt his feelings.[Pg 1243]

ALPHABET OF CELEBRITIES

BY OLIVER HERFORD

NONSENSE VERSES

BY GELETT BURGESS

1

2

3

4

5

THE SIEGE OF DJKLXPRWBZ

BY IRONQUILL

THE GOAT

BY R.K. MUNKITTRICK

IN DEFENSE OF AN OFFERING

BY SEWELL FORD

Gracious! You're not going to smoke again? I do believe, my dear, that you're getting to be a regular, etc., etc. (Voice from across the reading table.)

A slave to tobacco! Not I. Singular, the way you women misuse nouns. I am, rather, a chosen acolyte in the temple of Nicotiana. Daily, aye, thrice daily—well, call it six, then—do I make burnt offering. Now some use censers of clay, others employ censers of rare white earth finely carved and decked with silver and gold. My particular censer, as you see, is a plain, honest briar, a root dug from the banks of the blue Garonne, whose only glory is its grain and color. The original tint, if you remember, was like that of new-cut cedar, but use—I've been smoking this one only two years now—has given it gloss and depth of tone which put the finest mahogany to shame. Let me rub it on my sleeve. Now look!

There are no elaborate mummeries about our service in the temple of Nicotiana. No priest or pastor, no robed muezzin or gowned prelate calls me to the altar. Neither is there fixed hour or prescribed point of the compass towards which I must turn. Whenever the mood comes and the spirit listeth, I make devotion.

There are various methods, numerous brief litanies. Mine is a common and simple one. I take the cut Indian leaf in the left palm, so, and roll it gently about with the right, thus. Next I pack it firmly in the censer's hollow bowl with neither too firm nor too light a pressure. Any[Pg 1249] fire will do. The torch need not be blessed. Thanks, I have a match.

Now we are ready. With the surplus breath of life you draw in the fragrant spirit of the weed. With slow, reluctant outbreathing you loose it on the quiet air. Behold! That which was but a dead thing, lives. Perhaps we have released the soul of some brave red warrior who, long years ago, fell in glorious battle and mingled his dust with the unforgetting earth. Each puff may give everlasting liberty to some dead and gone aboriginal. If you listen you may hear his far-off chant. Through the curling blue wreaths you may catch a glimpse of the happy hunting grounds to which he has now gone. That is the part of the service whose losing or gaining depends upon yourself.

The first whiff is the invocation, the last the benediction. When you knock out the ashes you should feel conscious that you have done a good deed, that the offering has not been made in vain.

Slave! Still that odious word? Well, have it your own way. Worshipers at every shrine have been thus persecuted.[Pg 1250]

HE AND SHE

BY IRONQUILL

THE NOTARY OF PERIGUEUX

BY HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW

You must know, gentlemen, that there lived some years ago, in the city of Périgueux, an honest notary-public, the descendant of a very ancient and broken-down family, and the occupant of one of those old weather-beaten tenements which remind you of the times of your great-grandfather. He was a man of an unoffending, quiet disposition; the father of a family, though not the head of it,—for in that family "the hen over-crowed the cock," and the neighbors, when they spake of the notary, shrugged their shoulders, and exclaimed, "Poor fellow! his spurs want sharpening." In fine,—you understand me, gentlemen,—he was hen-pecked.

Well, finding no peace at home, he sought it elsewhere, as was very natural for him to do; and at length discovered a place of rest, far beyond the cares and clamors of domestic life. This was a little Café Estaminet, a short way out of the city, whither he repaired every evening to smoke his pipe, drink sugar-water, and play his favorite game of domino. There he met the boon companions he most loved; heard all the floating chitchat of the day; laughed when he was in merry mood; found consolation when he was sad; and at all[Pg 1252] times gave vent to his opinions, without fear of being snubbed short by a flat contradiction.

Now, the notary's bosom-friend was a dealer in claret and cognac, who lived about a league from the city, and always passed his evenings at the Estaminet. He was a gross, corpulent fellow, raised from a full-blooded Gascon breed, and sired by a comic actor of some reputation in his way. He was remarkable for nothing but his good-humor, his love of cards, and a strong propensity to test the quality of his own liquors by comparing them with those sold at other places.

As evil communications corrupt good manners, the bad practices of the wine-dealer won insensibly upon the worthy notary; and before he was aware of it, he found himself weaned from domino and sugar-water, and addicted to piquet and spiced wine. Indeed, it not unfrequently happened, that, after a long session at the Estaminet, the two friends grew so urbane that they would waste a full half-hour at the door in friendly dispute which should conduct the other home.

Though this course of life agreed well enough with the sluggish, phlegmatic temperament of the wine-dealer, it soon began to play the very deuse with the more sensitive organization of the notary, and finally put his nervous system completely out of tune. He lost his appetite, became gaunt and haggard, and could get no sleep. Legions of blue-devils haunted him by day, and by night strange faces peeped through his bed-curtains, and the nightmare snorted in his ear. The worse he grew, the more he smoked and tippled; and the more he smoked and tippled,—why, as a matter of course, the worse he grew. His wife alternately stormed, remonstrated, entreated; but all in vain. She made the house too hot for him,—he retreated to the tavern; she broke his long-stemmed[Pg 1253] pipes upon the andirons,—he substituted a short-stemmed one, which, for safe-keeping, he carried in his waistcoat-pocket.

Thus the unhappy notary ran gradually down at the heel. What with his bad habits and his domestic grievances, he became completely hipped. He imagined that he was going to die; and suffered in quick succession all the diseases that ever beset mortal man. Every shooting pain was an alarming symptom,—every uneasy feeling after dinner a sure prognostic of some mortal disease. In vain did his friends endeavor to reason, and then to laugh him out of his strange whims; for when did ever jest or reason cure a sick imagination? His only answer was, "Do let me alone; I know better than you what ails me."

Well, gentlemen, things were in this state, when, one afternoon in December, as he sat moping in his office, wrapped in an overcoat, with a cap on his head and his feet thrust into a pair of furred slippers, a cabriolet stopped at the door, and a loud knocking without aroused him from his gloomy revery. It was a message from his friend the wine-dealer, who had been suddenly attacked with a violent fever, and growing worse and worse, had now sent in the greatest haste for the notary to draw up his last will and testament. The case was urgent, and admitted neither excuse nor delay; and the notary, tying a handkerchief round his face, and buttoning up to the chin, jumped into the cabriolet, and suffered himself, though not without some dismal presentiments and misgivings of heart, to be driven to the wine-dealer's house.

When he arrived, he found everything in the greatest confusion. On entering the house, he ran against the apothecary, who was coming down stairs, with a face as long as your arm; and a few steps farther he met the[Pg 1254] housekeeper—for the wine-dealer was an old bachelor—running up and down, and wringing her hands, for fear that the good man should die without making his will. He soon reached the chamber of his sick friend, and found him tossing about in a paroxysm of fever, and calling aloud for a draught of cold water. The notary shook his head; he thought this a fatal symptom; for ten years back the wine-dealer had been suffering under a species of hydrophobia, which seemed suddenly to have left him.

When the sick man saw who stood by his bedside, he stretched out his hand and exclaimed,—

"Ah! my dear friend! have you come at last? You see it is all over with me. You have arrived just in time to draw up that—that passport of mine. Ah, grand diable! how hot it is here! Water,—water,—water! Will nobody give me a drop of cold water?"

As the case was an urgent one, the notary made no delay in getting his papers in readiness; and in a short time the last will and testament of the wine-dealer was drawn up in due form, the notary guiding the sick man's hand as he scrawled his signature at the bottom.

As the evening wore away, the wine-dealer grew worse and worse, and at length became delirious, mingling in his incoherent ravings the phrases of the Credo and Paternoster with the shibboleth of the dram-shop and the card-table.

"Take care! take care! There, now—Credo in—Pop! ting-a-ling-ling! give me some of that. Cent-é-dize! Why, you old publican, this wine is poisoned,—I know your tricks!—Sanctam ecclesiam catholicam—Well, well, we shall see. Imbecile! to have a tierce-major and a seven of hearts, and discard the seven! By St. Anthony, capot! You are lurched,—ha! ha! I told you so. I knew very[Pg 1255] well,—there,—there,—don't interrupt me—Carnis resurrectionem et vitam eternam!"

With these words upon his lips, the poor wine-dealer expired. Meanwhile the notary sat cowering over the fire, aghast at the fearful scene that was passing before him, and now and then striving to keep up his courage by a glass of cognac. Already his fears were on the alert; and the idea of contagion flitted to and fro through his mind. In order to quiet these thoughts of evil import, he lighted his pipe and began to prepare for returning home. At that moment the apothecary turned round to him and said,—

"Dreadful sickly time, this! The disorder seems to be spreading."

"What disorder?" exclaimed the notary, with a movement of surprise.

"Two died yesterday, and three to-day," continued the apothecary, without answering the question. "Very sickly time, sir,—very."

"But what disorder is it? What disease has carried off my friend here so suddenly?"

"What disease? Why, scarlet fever, to be sure."

"And is it contagious?"

"Certainly!"

"Then I am a dead man!" exclaimed the notary, putting his pipe into his waistcoat-pocket, and beginning to walk up and down the room in despair. "I am a dead man! Now don't deceive me,—don't, will you? What—what are the symptoms?"

"A sharp, burning pain in the right side," said the apothecary.

"O, what a fool I was to come here!"

In vain did the housekeeper and the apothecary strive to pacify him;—he was not a man to be reasoned with;[Pg 1256] he answered that he knew his own constitution better than they did, and insisted upon going home without delay. Unfortunately, the vehicle he came in had returned to the city, and the whole neighborhood was abed and asleep. What was to be done? Nothing in the world but to take the apothecary's horse, which stood hitched at the door, patiently waiting his master's will.

Well, gentlemen, as there was no remedy, our notary mounted this raw-boned steed and set forth upon his homeward journey. The night was cold and gusty, and the wind right in his teeth. Overhead the leaden clouds were beating to and fro, and through them the newly-risen moon seemed to be tossing and drifting along like a cock-boat in the surf; now swallowed up in a huge billow of cloud, and now lifted upon its bosom and dashed with silvery spray. The trees by the road-side groaned with a sound of evil omen; and before him lay three mortal miles, beset with a thousand imaginary perils. Obedient to the whip and spur, the steed leaped forward by fits and starts, now dashing away in a tremendous gallop, and now relaxing into a long, hard trot; while the rider, filled with symptoms of disease and dire presentiments of death, urged him on, as if he were fleeing before the pestilence.

In this way, by dint of whistling and shouting, and beating right and left, one mile of the fatal three was safely passed. The apprehensions of the notary had so far subsided, that he even suffered the poor horse to walk up hill; but these apprehensions were suddenly revived again with tenfold violence by a sharp pain in the right side, which seemed to pierce him like a needle.

"It is upon me at last!" groaned the fear-stricken man. "Heaven be merciful to me, the greatest of sinners! And must I die in a ditch, after all? He! get up,—get up!"[Pg 1257]

And away went horse and rider at full speed,—hurry-scurry,—up hill and down,—panting and blowing like a whirlwind. At every leap the pain in the rider's side seemed to increase. At first it was a little point like the prick of a needle,—then it spread to the size of a half-franc piece,—then covered a place as large as the palm of your hand. It gained upon him fast. The poor man groaned aloud in agony; faster and faster sped the horse over the frozen ground,—farther and farther spread the pain over his side. To complete the dismal picture the storm commenced,—snow mingled with rain. But snow, and rain, and cold were naught to him; for, though his arms and legs were frozen to icicles, he felt it not; the fatal symptom was upon him; he was doomed to die,—not of cold, but of scarlet fever!

At length, he knew not how, more dead than alive, he reached the gate of the city. A band of ill-bred dogs, that were serenading at a corner of the street, seeing the notary dash by, joined in the hue and cry, and ran barking and yelping at his heels. It was now late at night, and only here and there a solitary lamp twinkled from an upper story. But on went the notary, down this street and up that, till at last he reached his own door. There was a light in his wife's bedroom. The good woman came to the window, alarmed at such a knocking, and howling, and clattering at her door so late at night; and the notary was too deeply absorbed in his own sorrows to observe that the lamp cast the shadow of two heads on the window-curtain.

"Let me in! let me in! Quick! quick!" he exclaimed, almost breathless from terror and fatigue.

"Who are you, that come to disturb a lone woman at this hour of the night?" cried a sharp voice from above. "Begone about your business, and let quiet people sleep."[Pg 1258]

"Come down and let me in! I am your husband! Don't you know my voice? Quick, I beseech you; for I am dying here in the street!"

After a few moments of delay and a few more words of parley, the door was opened, and the notary stalked into his domicile, pale and haggard in aspect, and as stiff and straight as a ghost. Cased from head to heel in an armor of ice, as the glare of the lamp fell upon him, he looked like a knight-errant mailed in steel. But in one place his armor was broken. On his right side was a circular spot, as large as the crown of your hat, and about as black!

"My dear wife!" he exclaimed with more tenderness than he had exhibited for many years, "Reach me a chair. My hours are numbered. I am a dead man!"

Alarmed at these exclamations, his wife stripped off his overcoat. Something fell from beneath it, and was dashed to pieces on the hearth. It was the notary's pipe! He placed his hand upon his side, and, lo! it was bare to the skin! Coat, waistcoat, and linen were burnt through and through, and there was a blister on his side as large as your hand!

The mystery was soon explained, symptom and all. The notary had put his pipe into his pocket without knocking out the ashes! And so my story ends.

"Is that all?" asked the radical, when the story-teller had finished.

"That is all."

"Well, what does your story prove?"

"That is more than I can tell. All I know is that the story is true."

"And did he die?" said the nice little man in gosling-green.[Pg 1259]

"Yes; he died afterwards," replied the story-teller, rather annoyed by the question.

"And what did he die of?" continued gosling-green, following him up.

"What did he die of? why, he died—of a sudden!"[Pg 1260]

HOLLY SONG

BY CLINTON SCOLLARD

SONGS WITHOUT WORDS

BY ROBERT J. BURDETTE

TRIOLETS

BY C.W.M.

WHAT SHE SAID ABOUT IT

BY JOHN PAUL

AN EDUCATIONAL PROJECT

BY ROY FARRELL GREENE

THE CAMP-MEETING

BY BAYNARD RUST HALL

The camp was furnished with several stands for preaching, exhorting, jumping and jerking; but still one place was the pulpit, above all others. This was a large scaffold, secured between two noble sugar trees, and railed in to prevent from falling over in a swoon, or springing over in an ecstasy; its cover the dense foliage of the trees, whose trunks formed the graceful and massive columns. Here was said to be also the altar, but I could not see its horns or any sacrifice; and the pen, which I did see—a place full of clean straw, where were put into fold stray sheep willing to return. It was at this pulpit, with its altar and pen, the regular preaching was done; around here the congregation assembled; hence orders were issued; here, happened the hardest fights, and were gained the greatest victories, being the spot where it was understood Satan fought in person; and here could be seen gestures the most frantic, and heard noises the most unimaginable, and often the most appalling. It was the place, in short, where most crowded either with praiseworthy intentions of getting some religion, or with unholy purposes of being amused; we, of course, designing neither one nor the other, but only to see philosophically and make up an opinion. At every grand outcry a simultaneous rush would, however, take place from all parts of the camp, proper and improper, towards the pulpit, altar, and pen; till the crowding, by increasing the suffocation[Pg 1266] and the fainting, would increase the tumult and the uproar; but this, in the estimation of many devotees, only rendered the meeting more lively and interesting.

By considering what was done at this central station one may approximate the amount of spiritual labor done in a day, and then a week in the whole camp:

1. About day-break on Sabbath a horn blasted us up for public prayer and exhortation, the exercises continuing nearly two hours.

2. Before breakfast, another blast for family and private prayer; and then every tent became, in camp language, "a bethel of struggling Jacobs and prevailing Israels," every tree "an altar;" and every grove "a secret closet;" till the air all became religious words and phrases, and vocal with "Amens."

3. After a proper interval came a horn for the forenoon service; then was delivered the sermon, and that followed by an appendix of some half dozen exhortations let off right and left, and even behind the pulpit, that all might have a portion in due season.

4. We had private and secret prayer again before dinner;—some clambering into thick trees to be hid, but forgetting in their simplicity, that they were heard and betrayed. But religious devotion excuses all errors and mistakes.

5. The afternoon sermon with its bob-tail string of exhortations.

6. Private and family prayer about tea time.

7. But lastly, we had what was termed "a precious season," in the third regular service at the principia of the camp. This season began not long after tea and was kept up long after I left the ground; which was about midnight. And now sermon after sermon and exhortation after exhortation followed like shallow, foaming,[Pg 1267] roaring waters; till the speakers were exhausted and the assembly became an uneasy and billowy mass, now hushing to a sobbing quiescence, and now rousing by the groans of sinners and the triumphant cries of folks that had "jist got religion"; and then again subsiding to a buzzy state, occasioned by the whimpering and whining voices of persons giving spiritual advice and comfort! How like a volcanic crater after the evomition of its lava in a fit of burning cholic, and striving to resettle its angry and tumultuating stomach!

It is time, however, to speak of the three grand services and their concomitants, and to introduce several master spirits of the camp.

Our first character, is the Reverend Elder Sprightly. This gentleman was of good natural parts; and in a better school of intellectual discipline and more fortunate circumstances, he must have become a worthy minister of some more tasteful, literary and evangelical sect. As it was, he had only become what he never got beyond—"a very smart man;" and his aim had become one—to enlarge his own people. And in this work, so great was his success, that, to use his own modest boastfulness in his sermon to-day,—"although folks said when he came to the Purchase that a single corn-crib would hold his people, yet, bless the Lord, they had kept spreading and spreading till all the corn-cribs in Egypt weren't big enough to hold them!"

He was very happy at repartee, as Robert Dale Owen well knows; and not "slow" (inexpert) in the arts of "taking off"—and—"giving them their own." This trait we shall illustrate by an instance.

Mr. Sprightly was, by accident, once present where a Campbellite Baptist, that had recently taken out a right for administering six doses of lobelia, red pepper and[Pg 1268] steam to men's bodies, and a plunge into cold water for the good of their souls, was holding forth against all Doctors, secular and sacred, and very fiercely against Sprightly's brotherhood. Doctor Lobelia's text was found somewhere in Pope Campbell's New Testament; as it suited the following discourse introduced with the usual inspired preface:

DOCTOR LOBELIA'S SERMON

"Well, I never rub'd my back agin a collige, nor git no sheepskin, and allow the Apostuls didn't nither. Did anybody ever hear of Peter and Poll a-goin' to them new-fangled places and gitten skins to preach by? No, sirs, I allow not; no, sirs, we don't pretend to loguk—this here new testament's sheepskin enough for me. And don't Prisbeteruns and tother baby sprinklurs have reskorse to loguk and skins to show how them what's emerz'd didn't go down into the water and come up agin? And as to Sprightly's preachurs, don't they dress like big-bugs, and go ridin about the Purchis on hunder-dollur hossis, a-spunginin on poor priest-riden folks and a-eatin fried chickin fixins so powerful fast that chickins has got skerse in these diggins; and then what ain't fried makes tracks and hides when they sees them a-comin?

"But, dear bruthrun, we don't want store cloth and yaller buttins, and fat hossis and chickin fixins, and the like doins—no, sirs! we only wants your souls—we only wants beleevur's baptism—we wants prim—prim—yes, Apostul's Christianity, the Christianity of Christ and them times, when Christians was Christians, and tuk up thare cross and went down into the water, and was buried in the gineine sort of baptism by emerzhin. That's all we wants; and I hope all's convinced that's the true way—and so let all come right out from among them and git[Pg 1269] beleevur's baptism; and so now if any brothur wants to say a word I'm done, and I'll make way for him to preach."

Anticipating this common invitation, our friend Sprightly, indignant at this unprovoked attack of Doctor Lobelia, had, in order to disguise himself, exchanged his clerical garb for a friend's blue coatee bedizzened with metal buttons; and also had erected a very tasteful and sharp coxcomb on his head, out of hair usually reposing sleek and quiet in the most saint-like decorum; and then, at the bid from the pulpit-stump, out stepped Mr. Sprightly from the opposite spice-wood grove, and advanced with a step so smirky and dandyish as to create universal amazement and whispered demands—"Why! who's that?" And some of his very people, who were present, as they told me, did not know their preacher till his clear, sharp voice came upon the hearing, when they showed, by the sudden lifting of hands and eyebrows, how near they were to exclaiming: "Well! I never!"

Stepping on to the consecrated stump, our friend, without either preliminary hymn or prayer, commenced thus:

"My friends, I only intend to say a few words in answer to the pious brother that's just sat down, and shall not detain but a few minutes. The pious brother took a good deal of time to tell what we soon found out ourselves—that he never went to college and don't understand logic. He boasts, too, of having no sheepskin to preach by; but I allow any sensible buck-sheep would have died powerful sorry, if he'd ever thought his hide would come to be handled by some preachers. The skin of the knowingest old buck couldn't do some folks any good—some things salt won't save.

"I rather allow Johnny Calvin's boys and 'tother baby[Pg 1270] sprinklers,' ain't likely to have they idees physicked out of them by steam logic, and doses of No. 6. They can't be steamed up so high as to want cooling by a cold water plunge. But I want to say a word about Sprightly's preachers, because I have some slight acquaintance with that there gentleman, and don't choose to have them all run down for nothing.

"The pious brother brings several grave charges; first, they ride good horses. Now don't every man, woman and child in the Purchase know that Sprightly and his preachers have hardly any home, and that they live on horseback? The money most folks spend in land these men spend for a good horse; and don't they need a good horse to stand mud and swim floods? And is it any sin for a horse to be kept fat that does so much work? The book says 'a merciful man is merciful to his beast,' and that we mustn't 'muzzle the ox that treadeth out the corn.' Step round that fence corner, and take a peep, dear friends, at a horse hung on the stake; what's he like? A wooden frame with a dry hide stretched over it. What's he live on? Ay! that's the pint! Well, what's them buzzards after?—look at them sailing up there. Now who owns that live carrion?—the pious brother that's just preached to us just now. And I want to know if it wouldn't be better for him to give that dumb brute something to cover his bones, before he talks against 'hunder-dollur hossis' and the like?

"The next charge is, wearing good clothes. Friends, don't all folks when they come to meeting put on their best clothes? and wouldn't it be wrong if preachers came in old torn coats and dirty shirts? It wouldn't do no how. Well, Sprightly and his preachers preach near about every day; and oughtn't they always to look decent? Take, then, a peep at the pious brother that makes this charge;[Pg 1271] his coat is out at the elbow, and has only three or four buttons left, and his arm, where he wipes his nose and mouth, is shiny as a looking glass—his trousers are crawling up to show he's got no stockings on; and his face has got a crop of beard two weeks old and couldn't be cleaned by 'baby sprinklin''; yes, look at them there matters, and say if Sprightly's preachers ain't more like the apostles in decency than the pious brother is.

"A word now about chickin-fixins and doins. And I say it would be a charity to give the pious brother sich a feed now and then, for he looks half-starved, and savage as a meat-ax; and I advise that old hen out thare clucking up her brood not to come this way just now, if she don't want all to disappear. But I say that Sprightly's preachers are so much beliked in the Purchase, that folks are always glad to see them, and make a pint of giving them the best out of love; an' that's more than can be said for some folks here.

"The pious brother says he only wants our souls—then what makes him peddle about Thomsonian physic? Why don't he and Campbell make steam and No. 6 as free as preaching? I read of a quack doctor once, who used to give his advice free gratis for nothing to any one what would buy a box of his pills—but as I see the pious brother is crawling round the fence to his anatomical horse and physical saddle-bags, I have nothing to say, and so, dear friends, I bid you all good-by."

Such was Rev. Elder Sprightly, who preached to us on Sabbath morning at the Camp. Hence, it is not remarkable that in common with many worthy persons, he should think his talents properly employed in using up "Johnny Calvin and his boys," especially as no subject is better for popularity at a camp-meeting. He gave us, accordingly, first, that affecting story of Calvin and Ser[Pg 1272]vetus, in which the latter figured to-day like a Christian Confessor and martyr, and the former as a diabolical persecutor; many moving incidents being introduced not found in history, and many ingenious inferences and suppositions tending to blacken the Reformer's character. Judging from the frequency of the deep groans, loud amens, and noisy hallelujahs of the congregation during the narrative, had Calvin suddenly thrust in among us his hatchet face and goat's beard, he would have been hissed and pelted, nay possibly been lynched and soused in the branch; while the excellent Servetus would have been toted on our shoulders, and feasted in the tents on fried ham, cold chicken fixins and horse sorrel pies!

Here is a specimen of Mr. S.'s mode of exciting triumphant exclamation, amens, groans, etc., against Calvin and his followers: "Dear sisters, don't you love the tender little darling babes that hang on your parental bosoms? (amen!)—Yes! I know you do—(amen! amen!)—Yes, I know, I know it.—(Amen, amen! hallelujah!) Now don't it make your parental hearts throb with anguish to think those dear infantile darlings might some day be out burning brush and fall into the flames and be burned to death! (deep groans.)—Yes, it does, it does! But oh! sisters, oh! mothers! how can you think your babes mightn't get religion and die and be burned for ever and ever? (O! forbid—amen—groans.) But, oho! only think—only think, oh! would you ever a had them darling infantile sucklings born, if you had a known they were to be burned in a brush heap! (No, no!—groans—shrieks.) What! what! what! if you had foreknown they must have gone to hell?—(hoho! hoho—amen!) And does anybody think He is such a tyrant as to make spotless, innocent babies just to damn them? (No! in a voice of thunder.)—No! sisters! no! no! mothers! No! no! sin[Pg 1273]ners, no!!—He ain't such a tyrant! Let John Calvin burn, torture and roast, but He never foreordained babies, as Calvin says, to damnation! (damnation!—echoed by hundreds.)—Hallelujah! 'tis a free salvation! Glory! a free salvation!—(Here Mr. S. battered the rail of the pulpit with his fists, and kicked the bottom with his feet—many screamed—some cried amen!—others groaned and hissed—and more than a dozen females of two opposite colors arose and clapped their hands as if engaged in starching, etc., etc.) No-h-o! 'tis a free, a free, a free salvation!—away with Calvin! 'tis for all! all! all! Yes! shout it out! clap on! rejoice! rejoice! oho-oho! sinners, sinners, sinners, oh-ho-oho!" etc., etc.

Here was maintained for some minutes the most edifying uproar of shouting, bellowing, crying, clapping and stamping, mingled with hysterical laughing, termed out there "holy laughing," and even dancing! and barking! called also "holy!"—till, at the partial subsidence of the bedlam, the orator resumed his eloquence.

It is singular Mr. S. overlooked an objection to the divine Providence arising from his own illustration. That children do sometimes perish by being burnt and drowned, is undeniable; yet is not their existence prevented—and that in the very case where the sisters were induced to say they would have prevented their existence! But, in justice to Mr. S., we must say that he seemed to have anticipated the objection, and to have furnished the reply; for, said he, in one part of his discourse, "God did not wish to foreknow some things!"

But our friend's mode of avoiding a predestined death—if such an absurdity be supposed—deserves all praise for the facility and simplicity of the contrivance. "Let us," said he, "for argument's sake, grant that I, the Rev. Elder Sprightly, am foreordained to be drowned, in the[Pg 1274] river, at Smith's Ferry, next Thursday morning, at twenty-two minutes after ten o'clock; and suppose I know it; and suppose I am a free, moral, voluntary, accountable agent, as Calvinists say—do you think I'm going to be drowned? No!—I would stay at home all day; and you'll never ketch the Rev. Elder Sprightly at Smith's Ferry—nor near the river neither!"

Reader, is it any wonder Calvinism is on the decline? Logic it can stand; but human nature thus excited in opposition, it can not stand. Hence, throughout our vast assembly to-day, this unpopular ism, in spite of Calvin and the Epistle to the Romans, was put down; if not by acclamation, yet by exclamation—by shouting—by roaring—by groaning and hissing—by clapping and stamping—by laughing, and crying, and whining; and thus the end of the sermon was gained and the preacher glorified!

The introductory discourse in the afternoon was by the Rev. Remarkable Novus. This was a gentleman I had often the pleasure of entertaining at my house in Woodville; and he was a Christian in sentiment and feeling; for though properly and decidedly a warm friend to his own sect, he was charitably disposed toward myself and others that differed from him ecclesiastically. His talents were moderate; but his voice was transcendently excellent. It was rich, deep, mellow, liquid and sonorous, and capable of any inflections. It could preserve its melody in an unruffled flow, at a pitch far beyond the highest point reached by the best-cultivated voice. His fancy naturally capricious, was indulged without restraint; yet not being a learned or well-read man, he mistook words for ideas, and hence employed without stint all the terms in his vocabulary for the commonest thoughts. He believed, too, like most of his brotherhood, that excitement and agitation were necessary to conversion and of the essence[Pg 1275] of religion; and this, with a proneness to delight in the music and witchery of his own wonderful voice, made Mr. Novus an eccentric preacher, and induced him often to excel at camp-meetings, the very extravagances of his clerical brethren, whom more than once he has ridiculed and condemned at my fireside.

The camp-meeting was, in fact, too great a temptation for my friend's temperament, and the very theater for the full display of his magnificent voice; and naturally, this afternoon, off he set at a tangent, interrupting the current of his sermon by extemporaneous bursts of warning, entreaty and exhortation. Here is something like his discourse—yet done by me in a subdued tone—as, I repeat, are most extravaganzas of the ecclesiastical and spiritual sort, not only here, but in all other parts of the work.

"My text, dear hearers," said he, "on this auspicious, and solemn, and heaven-ordered occasion, is that exhortation of the inspired apostle, 'Walk worthy of your vocation.'

"And what, my dear brethren, what do you imagine and conjecture our holy penman meant by 'walking?' Think ye he meant a physical walking, and a moving, and a going backward and forward thus? (represented by Mr. N.'s proceeding, or rather marching, à la militaire, several times from end to end of the staging). No, sirs!—it was not a literal walking and locomotion, a moving and agitating of the natural legs and limbs. No, sirs!—no!—but it was a moral, a spiritual, a religious, ay! yes! a philosophical and metaphorically figurative walking, our holy apostle meant!

"Philosophic, did I say? Yes: philosophic did I say. For religion is the most philosophical thing in the universe—ay! throughout the whole expansive infinitude of the divine empire. Tell me, deluded infidels and mistaken[Pg 1276] unbelievers! tell me, ain't philosophy what's according to the consistency of nature's regular laws? and what's more onsentaneous and homogeneous to man's sublimated moral nature, than religion? Yes! tell me! Yes! yes! I am for a philosophical religion, and a philosophical religion is for me—ay! we are mutually made and formed for this beautiful reciprocality!

"And yet some say we make too much noise—even some of our respected Woodville merchants—(meaning the author). But what's worth making a noise about in the dark mundane of our terrestrial sphere, if religion ain't? People always, and everywhere in all places, make most noise about what they opine to be most precious. See! yon banner streaming with golden stars and glorious stripes over congregated troops, on the Fourth of July, that ever-memorable—that never-to-be-forgotten day, which celebrates the grand annual anniversary of our nation's liberty and independence! when our forefathers and ancestors burst asunder and tore forever off the iron chains of political thraldom! and rose in plenitude, ay! in the magnificence of their grandeur, and crushed their oppressors!—yes! and hurled down dark despotism from the lofty pinnacle of its summit altitude, where she was seated on her liberty-crushing throne, and hurled her out of her iron chariot, as her wheels thundered over the prostrate slaves of power!—(Amen)—Yes!—hark!—we make a noise about that! But what's civil liberty to religious liberty, and emancipated disenthraldom from the dark despotism of yonder terrific prince of darkness! whose broad, black, piniony wings spread wide o'er the ærial concave like a dense cloud upon a murky sky?—(A-a-men!)—And ain't it, ye men of yards and measures, philosophical to make a noise about this?—(Amen!—yes!) Yes! yes! and I ain't ashamed to rejoice and[Pg 1277] shout aloud. Ay! as long as the prophet was ordered to stamp with his foot, I will stamp with my foot;—(here he stamped till the platform trembled for its safety)—and to smite with his hand, I will smite with my hand—(slapping alternate hands on alternate thighs.)—Yes! and I will shout, too!—and cry aloud, and spare not—glory! for—ever!—(and here his voice rang out like the sweet, clear tones of a bugle).

"And, therefore, my dear sisters and brethren, let us walk worthy of our vocation; not with the natural legs of the physical corporation, but in the apostolical way, with the metaphysical and figurative legs of the mind—(here Mr. N. caught some one smiling).—Take care, sinner, take care! curl not the scornful nose—I'm willing to be a fool for religion's sake—but turn not up the scornful nose—do its ministers no harm! Sinner, mark me!—in yon deep and tangled grove, where tall, aspiring trees wave green and lofty heads in the free air of balmy skies—there sinner, an hour ago, when the sonorous horn called on our embattled hosts to go to private prayer! an hour ago, in yonder grove I knelt and prayed for you!—(hooh!)—yes! I prayed some poor soul might be given for my hire!—and he promised me one!—(Glory! glory!—ah! give him one!)—laughing sinner!—take care!—I'll have you!—(Grant it—amen!—ooohoo!) Look out, I'm going to fire—(assuming the attitude of rifle-shooting)—bang!—may He send that through your heart!—may it pierce clean home through joints and marrow!—and let all people say amen!—(and here amen was said, and not in the tame style of the American Archbishop of Canterbury's cathedral, be assured; but whether the spiritual bullet hit the chap aimed at, I never learned; if it did, his groans were inaudible in the alarming thunder of that amen).

"Ay! ay! that's the way! that's the way! don't be[Pg 1278] ashamed of your vocation—that's the way to walk and let your light shine! Now, some wise folks despise light, and call for miracles: but when we can't have one kind of light, let us be philosophical, and take another. For my part, when I'm bogging about these dark woods, far away in the silent, somber shadows, I rejoice in sunshine; and would prefer it of choice, rather than all other celestial and translucent luminaries: but when the gentle fanning zephyrs of the shadowy night breathe soft among the trembling leaves and sprays of the darkening forests, then I rejoice in moonshine: and when the moonshine dims and pales away, with the waning silvery queen of heaven in her azure zone, I look up to the blue concave of the circular vault, and rejoice in starlight. No! no! no! any light!—give us any light rather than none!—(Ah, do, good—!) Yes! yes! we are the light of the world, and so let us let our light shine, whether sunshine, or moonshine, or starlight!—(oohoo!)—and then the poor benighted sinner, bogging about this terraqueous, but dark and mundane sphere, will have a light like a pole star of the distant north, to point and guide him to the sunlit climes of yonder world of bright and blazing bliss!"—(A-a-amen!)

Such is part of the sermon. His concluding prayer ended thus—(Divine names omitted).

"Oh, come down! come, come down! down! now!—to-night!—do wonders then! come down in might! come down in power! let salvation roll! Come down! come! and let the earthquaking mighty noise of thy thundering chariot wheels be heard, and felt, and seen, and experienced in the warring elements of our spiritualized hearts!"

During the prayer, many petitions and expressions were so rapturously and decidedly encored, that our friend[Pg 1279] kindly repeated them; and sometimes, like public singers, with handsome variations; and many petitions by amateur zealots were put forth, without any notice of the current prayer offered by Mr. N., yet evidently having in view some elegancy of his sermon. And not a few petitions, I regret to say, seemed to misapprehend the drift and scope of the preacher. One of this sort was the earnest ejaculations of an old and worthy brother, who, in a hollow, sepulchral, and rather growly voice, bellowed out in a very beautiful part of the grand prayer: "Oohhoo! take away moonshine!"

But our first performance was to be at night: and at the first toot of the tin horn we assembled in expectation of a "good time." For, 1. All day preparation had been making for the night; and the actors seemed evidently in restraint, as in mere rehearsal: 2. The night better suits displays and scenes of any kind: but 3. The African was to preach; and rumor had said, "he was a most powerful big preacher, that could stir up folks mighty quick, and use up the ole feller in less than no time."

After prefatory prayers and hymns, and pithy exhortations by several brothers of the Circassian breed, our dusky divine, the Rev. Mizraim Ham, commenced his sermon, founded on the duel between David and Goliath.

This discourse we shall condense into a few pages; although the comedy or mellow-drama—for it greatly mellowed and relaxed the muscles—required for its entire action a full hour. There was, indeed, a prologue, but the rest was mainly dialogue, in which Mr. Ham wonderfully personated all the different speakers, varying his tone, manner, attitude, etc., as varying characters and circumstances demanded. We fear much of the spirit has evaporated in this condensation; but that evil is unavoidable.[Pg 1280]

REV. MIZRAIM HAM'S DISCOURSE

"Bruthurn and sisturn, tention, if you pleases, while I want you for to understand this here battul most partiklur 'zact, or may be you moughtn't comprend urn. Furst place, I gwyin to undevur to sarcumscribe fust the 'cashin of this here battul: second place, the 'comdashins of the armies: third place, the folkses as was gwyin for to fite and didn't want to, and some did: and last and fourth place, I'm gwyin for to show purtiklur 'zact them as fit juul, and git victry and git kill'd.

"Tention, if you please, while I fustly sarcumscribe the 'casion of this here battul. Bruthurn and sisturn, you see them thar hethun Fillystines, what warn't circumcised, they wants to ketch King Sol and his 'ar folks for to make um slave; and so, they cums down to pick a quorl, and begins a-totin off all their cawn, and wouldn't 'low um to make no hoes to hoe um, nor no homnee. And that 'ar, you see, stick in King Solsis gizurd; and he ups and says, says he, 'I'm not gwying to be used up that 'ar away by them uncircumcis'd hethun Fillystines, and let um tote off our folkses cawn to chuck to thar hogs, and take away our hoes so we can't hoe um—and so, Jonathun, we'll drum up and list soljurs and try um a battul.' And then King Sol and his 'ar folks they goes up, and the hethun and theirn comes down and makes war. And this is the 'cashin why they fit.

"Tention, 'gin, if you pleases, I'm gwyin in the next place secondly, to show the 'comdashins of this here battul, which was so fashin like. The Fillystines they had thar army up thar on a mounting, and King Sol he had hissin over thar, like, across a branch, amoss like that a one thar—(pointing)—and it was chuck full of sling rock all along on the bottom. And so they was both on[Pg 1281] um camp'd out; this a one on this 'ar side, and tother a one on tother, and the lilly branch tween um—and them's the 'comdashins.

"Tention once more agin, as 'caze next place thirdly, I'm a gwyin to give purtiklur 'zact 'count of sum folkses what fit and sum didn't want to. And lubly sinnahs, maybe you minds um, as how King Sol and his soljurs was pepper hot for fite when he fust liss um; but now, lubly sinnahs, when they gits up to the Fillystines, they cool off mighty quick, I tell you! 'Caze why? I tell you; why, 'caze a grate, big, ugly ole jiunt, with grate big eyes, so fashin—(Mr. Ham made giant's eyes here)—he kums a rampin' out a frount o' them 'ar rigiments, like the ole devul a gwyin about like a half-starv'd lion a-seeking to devour poor lubly sinnahs! And he cum a-jumpin and a-tearin out so fashin—(actions to suit)—to git sum of King Solsis soljurs to fite urn juul; and King Sol, lubly bruthurn and sisturn, he gits sker'd mighty quick, and he says to Jonathun and tother big officers, says he, 'I ain't a gwyin for to fite that grate big fellah.' And arter that they ups and says, 'We ain't a gwying for to fite um nuther, 'caze he's all kiver'd with sheetirun, and his head's up so high we muss stand a hoss back to reach um!'—the jiunt he was so big!!

"And then King Sol he quite down in the jaw, and he turn and ax if somebody wouldn't hunt up a soljur as would fite juul with um; and he'd give um his dawtah, the prinsuss, for wife, and make um king's son-in-law. And then one old koretur, they call him Abnah, he comes up and says to Sol so: 'Please, your majustee, sir, I kin git a young fellah to fite um,' says he. And Abnah tells how Davy had jist rid up in his carruge and left um with the man what tend the hossis—and how he heern Davy a quorl'n with his bruthers and a wantun to fite the jiunt.[Pg 1282] Then King Sol, he feel mighty glad, I tell you, sinnahs, and he make um bring um up, and King Sol he begins a-talkin so, and Davy he answers so:—

"'What's your name, lilly fellah?'

"'I was krissen'd Davy.'

"'Who's your farder?'

"'They call um Jesse.'

"'What you follur for livin?'

"'I 'tend my farder's sheep.'

"'What you kum arter? Ain't you affeerd of that 'ar grate ugly ole jiunt up thar, lilly Davy?'

"'I kum to see arter my udder brudurs, and bring um in our carruge some cheese and muttun, and some clene shirt and trowser, and have tother ones wash'd. And when I cum I hear ole Golliawh a hollerin out for somebody to cum and fite juul with um; and all the soljurs round thar they begins for to make traks mighty quick, I tell you, please your majuste, sir, for thar tents; but, says I, what you run for? I'm not a-gwyin for to run away—if King Sol wants somebody for to fite the jiunt, I'll fite um for um.'

"'I mighty feer'd, lilly Davy you too leetul for um—'

"'No! King Sol, I kin lick um. One day I gits asleep ahind a rock, and out kums a lion and a bawr, and begins a-totin off a lilly lam; and when I heern um roarin and pawin 'bout, I rubs my eyes and sees um gwyin to the mountings—and I arter and ketch'd up and kill um both without no gun nor sword—and I bring back poor lilly lamb. I kin lick ole Goliawh, I tell you, please your majuste, sir.'

"Then King Sol he wery glad, and pat um on the head, and calls um 'lilly Davy,' and wants to put on um his own armur made of brass and sheetirum and to take his sword, but Davy didn't like um, but said he'd trust to his sling.[Pg 1283] And then out he goes to fite the ole jiunt; and this 'ar brings me to the fourth and last diwishin of our surmun.

"'Tention once more agin, for lass time, as I'm gwyin to give most purtikurlust 'zactest 'count of the juul atween lilly Davy and ole Goliawh the jiunt, to show, lubly sinnah! how the Lord's peepul without no carnul gun nor sword, can fite ole Bellzybub and knock um over with the sling rock of prayer, as lilly Davy knocked over Goliawh with hissin out of the Branch.

"And to 'lusterut the juul and make um spikus, I'll show 'zactly how they talk'd, and jaw'd, and fit it all out; and so ole Goliawh when he sees Davy a kumun, he hollurs out so, and lilly Davy he say back so:

"'What you kum for, lilly Jew?—'

"'What I kum for? you'll find out mighty quick, I tell you—I kum for fite juul—'

"'Huhh! huhh! haw!—t'ink I'm gwyin to fite puttee lilly baby? I want King Sol or Abnah, or a big soljur man—'

"'Hole your jaw—I'll make you laugh tother side, ole grizzle-gruzzle, 'rectly—I'm man enough for biggust jiunt Fillystine.'

"'Go way, poor lilly boy! go home, lilly baby, to your mudder, and git sugar plum—I no want kill puttee lilly boy—'

"'Kum on!—don't be afeerd!—don't go for to run away!—I'll ketch you and lick you—'

"'You leetul raskul—I'll kuss you by all our gods—I'll cut out your sassy tung—I'll break your blackguard jaw—I'll rip you up and give um to the dogs and crows—'

"'Don't cuss so, ole Golly! I 'sposed you wanted to fite juul—so kum on with your old irun-pot hat on—you'll git belly full mighty quick—'[Pg 1284]

"'You nasty leetle raskul, I'll kum and kill you dead as chopped sassudge.'"

Here the preacher represented the advance of the parties; and gave a florid and wonderfully effective description of the closing act partly by words and partly by pantomime; exhibiting innumerable marches and counter-marches to get to windward, and all the postures, and gestures, and defiances, till at last he personated David putting his hand into a bag for a stone; and then making his cotton handkerchief into a sling, he whirled it with fury half a dozen times around his head, and then let fly with much skill at Goliath; and at the same instant halloing with the frenzy of a madman—"Hurraw for lilly Davy!" At that cry he, with his left hand, struck himself a violent slap on the forehead, to represent the blow of the sling-stone hitting the giant; and then in person of Goliath he dropped quasi dead upon the platform amid the deafening plaudits of the congregation; all of whom, some spiritually, some sympathetically, and some carnally, took up the preacher's triumph shout—

"Hurraw! for lilly Davy!"

How the Rev. Mizraim Ham made his exit from the boards I could not see—perhaps he rolled or crawled off. But he did not suffer decapitation, like "ole Golly": since in ten minutes, his woolly pate suddenly popped up among the other sacred heads that were visible over the front railing of the rostrum, as all kept moving to and fro in the wild tossings of religious frenzy.

Scarcely had Mr. Ham fallen at his post, when a venerable old warrior, with matchless intrepidity, stepped into the vacated spot; and without a sign of fear carried on the contest against the Arch Fiend, whose great ally had been so recently overthrown—i.e., Goliath, (not Mr. Ham). Yet excited, as evidently was this veteran, he[Pg 1285] still could not forego his usual introduction, stating how old he was; where he was born; where he obtained religion; how long he had been a preacher; how many miles he had traveled in a year; and when he buried his wife—all of which edifying truths were received with the usual applauses of a devout and enlightened assembly. But this introduction over—which did not occupy more than fifteen or twenty minutes—he began his attack in fine style, waxing louder and louder as he proceeded, till he exceeded all the old gentlemen to "holler" I ever heard, and indeed old ladies either.

EXTRACT FROM HIS DISCOURSE

"... Yes, sinners! you'll all have to fall and be knock'd down some time or nuther, like the great giant we've heern tell on, when the Lord's sarvints come and fight agin you! Oho! sinner! sinner!—oh!—I hope you may be knock'd down to-night—now!—this moment—and afore you die and go to judgment! Yes! oho! yes! oh!—I say judgment—for it's appinted once to die and then the judgment—oho! oh! And what a time ther'll be then! You'll see all these here trees—and them 'are stars, and yonder silver moon afire!—and all the alliments a-meltin and runnin down with fervent heat-ah!"—(I have elsewhere stated that the unlearned preachers out there (?) are by the vulgar—(not the poor)—but the vulgar, supposed to be more favored in preaching than man-made preachers; and that the sign of an unlearned preacher's inspiration being in full blast is his inhalations, which puts an ah! to the end of sentences, members, words, and even exclamations, till his breath is all gone, and no more can be sucked in)—"Oho! hoah! fervent heat-ah! and the trumpit a-soundin-ah[Pg 1286]!—and the dead arisin-ah!—and all on us a-flyin-ah!—to be judged-ah!—O-hoah! sinner—sinner—sinner—sinner-ah! And what do I see away thar'-ah!—down the Mississippi-ah!—thar's a man jist done a-killin-ah another-ah!—and up he goes with his bloody dagger-ah! And what's that I see to the East-ah! where proud folks live clothed in purple-ah! and fine linen-ah!—I see 'em round a table a drinkin a decoction of Indian herb-ah!—and up they go with cups in thar hands-ah! and see—ohoah!—see! in yonder doggery some a dancin-ah! and fiddlin-ah!—and up they go-ah! with cards-ah! and fiddle-ah!" etc., etc.

Here the tempest around drowned the voice of the old hero; although, from the frantic violence of his gestures, the frightful distortion of his features, and the Pythonic foam of his mouth, he was plainly blazing away at the enemy. The uproar, however, so far subsided as to allow my hearing his closing exhortation, which was this:

"... Yes, I say—fall down—fall down all of you, on your knees!—shout!—cry aloud!—spare not!—stamp with the foot!—smite with the hand!—down! down!—that's it—down brethren!—down preachers!—down sisters!—pray away!—take it by storm!—fire away! fire away! not one at a time! not two together-ah!—a single shot the devil will dodge-ah!—give it to him all at once—fire a whole platoon!—at him!!"

And then such platoon firing as followed! If Satan stood that, he can stand much more than the worthy folks thought he could. And, indeed, the effect was wonderful!—more than forty thoughtless sinners that came for fun, and twice as many backsliders were instantly knocked over!—and there all lay, some with violent jerkings and writhings of body, and some uttering the most[Pg 1287] piercing and dismaying shrieks and groans! The fact is, I was nearly knocked down myself—

"You?—Mr. Carlton!!"

Yes—indeed—but not by the hail of spiritual shot falling so thick around me; it was by a sudden rush towards my station, where I stood mounted on a stump. And this rush was occasioned by a wish to see a stout fellow lying on the straw in the pen, a little to my left, groaning and praying, and yet kicking and pummelling away as if scuffling with a sturdy antagonist. Near him were several men and women at prayer, and one or more whispering into his ear; while on a small stump above stood a person superintending the contest, and so as to insure victory to the right party. Now the prostrate man, who like a spirited tom-cat seemed to fight best on his back, was no other than our celebrated New Purchase bully—Rowdy Bill! And this being reported through the congregation, the rush had taken place by which I was so nearly overturned. I contrived, however, to regain my stand, shared indeed now with several others, we hugging one another and standing on tip-toes and our necks elongated as possible; and thus we managed to have a pretty fair view of matters.

About this time the Superintendent in a very loud voice cried out—"Let him alone, brothers! let him alone sisters! keep on praying!—it's a hard fight—the devil's got a tight grip yet! He don't want to lose poor Bill—but he'll let go soon—Bill's gittin the better on him fast!—Pray away!"

Rowdy Bill, be it known, was famous as a gouger, and so expert was he in his antioptical vocation, that in a few moments he usually bored out an antagonist's eyes, or made him cry peccavi. Indeed, could he, on the present occasion, have laid hold of his unseen foe's head—spirit[Pg 1288]ually we mean—he would—figuratively, of course—soon have caused him to ease off or let go entirely his metaphorical grip. So, however, thought one friend in the assembly—Bill's wife. For Bill was a man after her own heart; and she often said that "with fair play she sentimentally allowed her Bill could lick ary a man in the 'varsal world, and his weight in wild cats to boot." Hence, the kind-hearted creature, hearing that Bill was actually fighting with the evil one, had pressed in from the outskirts to see fair play; but now hearing Bill was in reality down, and apparently undermost, and above all, the words of the Superintendent, declaring that the fiend had a tight grip of the poor fellow, her excitement would no longer be controlled; and, collecting her vocal energies, she screamed out her common exhortation to Bill, and which, when heeded, had heretofore secured him immediate victories—"Gouge him, Billy!—gouge him, Billy!—gouge him!"

This spirited exclamation was instantly shouted by Bill's cronies and partizans—mischievously, maybe, for we have no right to judge of men's motives, in meetings:—but a few—friends, doubtless, of the old fellow—cried out in very irreverent tone—"Bite him! devil—bite him!" Upon which the faithful wife, in a tone of voice that beggars description, reiterated her—"Gouge him," etc.—in which she was again joined by her husband's allies, and that to the alarm of his invisible foe; for Bill now rose to his knees, and on uttering some mystic jargon symptomatic of conversion, he was said to have "got religion";—and then all his new friends and spiritual guides united in fresh prayers and shouts of thanksgiving.

It was now very late at night; and joining a few other citizens of Woodville, we were soon in our saddles and buried in the darkness of the forest. For a long time,[Pg 1289] however, the uproar of the spiritual elements at the camp continued at intervals to swell and diminish on the hearing; and, often came a yell that rose far above the united din of other screams and outcries. Nay, at the distance of nearly two miles, could be distinguished a remarkable and sonorous oh!—like the faintly heard explosion of a mighty elocutional class, practising under a master. And yet my comrades, who had heard this peculiar cry more than once, all declared that this wonderful oh-ing was performed by the separate voice of our townsman, Eolus Letherlung, Esq.!

CONCLUSION

A camp-meeting of this sort is, all things considered, the very best contrivance for making the largest number of converts in the shortest possible time; and also for enlarging most speedily the bounds of a Church Visible and Militant.[Pg 1290]

A RHYME FOR CHRISTMAS

BY JOHN CHALLING

Publication delayed by the author's determined but futile attempt to find the rhyme

MY CIGARETTE[1]

BY CHARLES F. LUMMIS

IT IS TIME TO BEGIN TO CONCLUDE

BY A.H. LAIDLAW

NOTHIN' DONE[2]

BY SAM S. STINSON

[Pg 1297]

MARGINS

BY ROBERT J. BURDETTE

THE DUBIOUS FUTURE

BY BILL NYE

Without wishing to alarm the American people, or create a panic, I desire briefly and seriously to discuss the great question, "Whither are we drifting, and what is to be the condition of the coming man?" We can not shut our eyes to the fact that mankind is passing through a great era of change; even womankind is not built as she was a few brief years ago. And is it not time, fellow citizens, that we pause to consider what is to be the future of the American?

Food itself has been the subject of change both in the matter of material and preparation. This must affect the consumer in such a way as to some day bring about great differences. Take, for instance, the oyster, one of our comparatively modern food and game fishes, and watch the effects of science upon him. At one time the oyster browsed around and ate what he could find in Neptune's back-yard, and we had to eat him as we found him. Now we take a herd of oysters off the trail, all run down, and feed them artificially till they swell up to a fancy size, and bring a fancy price. Where will this all lead at last, I ask as a careful scientist? Instead of eating apples, as Adam did, we work the fruit up into apple-jack and pie, while even the simple oyster is perverted, and instead of being allowed to fatten up in the fall on acorns and ancient mariners, spurious flesh is put on his bones by the artificial osmose and dialysis of our advanced civilization. How[Pg 1299] can you make an oyster stout or train him down by making him jerk a health lift so many hours every day, or cultivate his body at the expense of his mind, without ultimately not only impairing the future usefulness of the oyster himself, but at the same time affecting the future of the human race who feed upon him?

I only use the oyster as an illustration, and I do not wish to cause alarm, but I say that if we stimulate the oyster artificially and swell him up by scientific means, we not only do so at the expense of his better nature and keep him away from his family, but we are making our mark on the future race of men. Oyster-fattening is now, of course, in its infancy. Only a few years ago an effort was made at St. Louis to fatten cove oysters while in the can, but the system was not well understood, and those who had it in charge only succeeded in making the can itself more plump. But now oysters are kept on ground feed and given nothing to do for a few weeks, and even the older and overworked sway-backed and rickety oysters of the dim and murky past are made to fill out, and many of them have to put a gore in the waistband of their shells. I only speak of the oyster incidentally, as one of the objects toward which science has turned its attention, and I assert with the utmost confidence that the time will come, unless science should get a set-back, when the present hunting-case oyster will give place to the open-face oyster, grafted on the octopus and big enough to feed a hotel. Further than that, the oyster of the future will carry in a hip-pocket a flask of vinegar, half a dozen lemons and two little Japanese bottles, one of which will contain salt and the other pepper, and there will be some way provided by which you can tell which is which. But are we improving the oyster now? That is a question we may well ask ourselves. Is this a healthy fat which we[Pg 1300] are putting on him, or is it bloat? And what will be the result in the home-life of the oyster? We take him from all domestic influences whatever in order to make a swell of him by our modern methods, but do we improve his condition morally, and what is to be the great final result on man?

The reader will see by the questions I ask that I am a true scientist. Give me an overcoat pocket full of lower-case interrogation marks and a medical report to run to, and I can speak on the matter of science and advancement till Reason totters on her throne.

But food and oysters do not alone affect the great, pregnant future. Our race is being tampered with not only by means of adulterations, political combinations and climatic changes, but even our methods of relaxation are productive of peculiar physical conditions, malformations and some more things of the same kind.

Cigarette smoking produces a flabby and endogenous condition of the optic nerve, and constant listening at a telephone, always with the same ear, decreases the power of the other ear till it finally just stands around drawing its salary, but actually refusing to hear anything. Carrying an eight-pound cane makes a man lopsided, and the muscular and nervous strain that is necessary to retain a single eyeglass in place and keep it out of the soup, year after year, draws the mental stimulus that should go to the thinker itself, until at last the mind wanders away and forgets to come back, or becomes atrophied, and the great mental strain incident to the work of pounding sand or coming in when it rains is more than it is equal to.

Playing billiards, accompanied by the vicious habit of pounding on the floor with the butt of the cue ever and anon, produces at last optical illusions, phantasmagoria and visions of pink spiders with navy-blue abdomens.[Pg 1301] Baseball is not alone highly injurious to the umpire, but it also induces crooked fingers, bone spavin and hives among habitual players. Jumping the rope induces heart disease. Poker is unduly sedentary in its nature. Bicycling is highly injurious, especially to skittish horses. Boating induces malaria. Lawn tennis can not be played in the house. Archery is apt to be injurious to those who stand around and watch the game, and pugilism is a relaxation that jars heavily on some natures.

Foot-ball produces what may be called the endogenous or ingrowing toenail, stringhalt and mania. Copenhagen induces a melancholy, and the game of bean bag is unduly exciting. Horse racing is too brief and transitory as an outdoor game, requiring weeks and months for preparation and lasting only long enough for a quick person to ejaculate "Scat!" The pitcher's arm is a new disease, the outgrowth of base-ball; the lawn-tennis elbow is another result of a popular open-air amusement, and it begins to look as though the coming American would hear with one overgrown telephonic ear, while the other will be rudimentary only. He will have an abnormal base-ball arm with a lawn-tennis elbow, a powerful foot-ball-kicking leg with the superior toe driven back into the palm of his foot. He will have a highly trained biceps muscle over his eye to retain his glass, and that eye will be trained to shoot a curved glance over a high hat and witness anything on the stage.

Other features grow abnormal, or shrink up from the lack of use, as a result of our customs. For instance, the man whose business it is to get along a crowded street with the utmost speed will have, finally, a hard, sharp horn growing on each elbow, and a pair of spurs growing out of each ankle. These will enable him to climb over a crowd and get there early. Constant exposure to these[Pg 1302] weapons on the part of the pedestrian will harden the walls of the thorax and abdomen until the coming man will be an impervious man. The citizen who avails himself of all modern methods of conveyance will ride from his door on the horse car to the elevated station, where an elevator will elevate him to the train and a revolving platform will swing him on board, or possibly the street car will be lifted from the surface track to the elevated track, and the passenger will retain his seat all the time. Then a man will simply hang out a red card, like an express card, at his door, and a combination car will call for him, take him to the nearest elevated station, elevate him, car and all, to the track, take him where he wants to go, and call for him at any hour of the night to bring him home. He will do his exercising at home, chiefly taking artificial sea baths, jerking a rowing machine or playing on a health lift till his eyes hang out on his cheeks, and he need not do any walking whatever. In that way the coming man will be over-developed above the legs, and his lower limbs will look like the desolate stems of a frozen geranium. Eccentricities of limb will be handed over like baldness from father to son among the dwellers in the cities, where every advantage in the way of rapid transit is to be had, until a metropolitan will be instantly picked out by his able digestion and rudimentary legs, just as we now detect the gentleman from the interior by his wild endeavors to overtake an elevated train.

In fact, Mr. Edison has now perfected, or announced that he is on the road to the perfection of, a machine which I may be pardoned for calling a storage think-tank. This will enable a brainy man to sit at home, and, with an electric motor and a perfected phonograph, he can think into a tin dipper or funnel, which will, by the aid of electricity and a new style of foil, record and preserve his[Pg 1303] ideas on a sheet of soft metal, so that when any one says to him, "A penny for your thoughts," he can go to his valise and give him a piece of his mind. Thus the man who has such wild and beautiful thoughts in the night and never can hold on to them long enough to turn on the gas and get his writing materials, can set this thing by the head of his bed, and, when the poetic thought comes to him in the stilly night, he can think into a hopper, and the genius of Franklin and Edison together will enable him to fire it back at his friends in the morning while they eat their pancakes and glucose syrup from Vermont, or he can mail the sheet of tinfoil to absent friends, who may put it into their phonographs and utilize it. In this way the world may harness the gray matter of its best men, and it will be no uncommon thing to see a dozen brainy men tied up in a row in the back office of an intellectual syndicate, dropping pregnant thoughts into little electric coffee mills for a couple of hours a day, after which they can put on their coats, draw their pay, and go home.

All this will reduce the quantity of exercise, both mental and physical. Two men with good brains could do the thinking for 60,000,000 of people and feel perfectly fresh and rested the next day. Take four men, we will say, two to do the day thinking and two more to go on deck at night, and see how much time the rest of the world would have to go fishing. See how politics would become simplified. Conventions, primaries, bargains and sales, campaign bitterness and vituperation—all might be wiped out. A pair of political thinkers could furnish 100,000,000 of people with logical conclusions enough to last them through the campaign and put an unbiased opinion into a man's house each day for less than he now pays for gas. Just before election you could go into your private office, throw in a large dose of campaign whisky, light a cam[Pg 1304]paign cigar, fasten your buttonhole to the wall by an elastic band, so that there would be a gentle pull on it, and turn the electricity on your mechanical thought supply. It would save time and money, and the result would be the same as it is now. This would only be the beginning, of course, and after a while every qualified voter who did not feel like exerting himself so much, need only give his name and proxy to the salaried thinker employed by the National Think Retort and Supply Works. We talk a great deal about the union of church and state, but that is not so dangerous, after all, as the mixture of politics and independent thought. Will the coming voter be an automatic, legless, hairless mollusk with an abnormal ear constantly glued to the tube of a big tank full of symmetrical ideas furnished by a national bureau of brains in the employ of the party in power?[Pg 1305]

UTAH

BY EUGENE FIELD

TALK

BY JOHN PAUL

A WINTER FANCY

(Little Tommy Loq)

BY R.K. MUNKITTRICK

JACK BALCOMB'S PLEASANT WAYS

BY MEREDITH NICHOLSON

There comes a time in the life of young men when their college fraternity pins lie forgotten in the collar-button box and the spiking of freshmen ceases to be a burning issue. Tippecanoe was one of the few freshwater colleges that barred women; but this was not its only distinction, for its teaching was sound, its campus charming and the town of which it was the chief ornament a quiet place noted from the beginning of things for its cultivated people.

It is no longer so very laudable for a young man to pay his way through college; and Morris Leighton had done this easily and without caring to be praised or martyrized for doing so. He had enjoyed his college days; he had been popular with town and gown; and he had managed to get his share of undergraduate fun while leading his classes. He had helped in the college library; he had twisted the iron letter-press on the president's correspondence late into the night; he had copied briefs for a lawyer after hours; but he had pitched for the nine and hustled for his "frat," and he had led class rushes with ardor and success.

He had now been for several years in the offices of Knight, Kittredge and Carr at Mariona, only an hour's ride from Tippecanoe; and he still kept in touch with the college. Michael Carr fully appreciated a young man who took the law seriously and who could sit down in a[Pg 1310] court room on call mornings, when need be, and turn off a demurrer without paraphrasing it from a text-book.

Mrs. Carr, too, found Morris Leighton useful, and she liked him, because he always responded unquestioningly to any summons to fill up a blank at her table; and if Mr. Carr was reluctant at the last minute to attend a lecture on "Egyptian Burial Customs," Mrs. Carr could usually summon Morris Leighton by telephone in time to act as her escort. Young men were at a premium in Mariona, as in most other places, and it was something to have one of the species, of an accommodating turn, and very presentable, within telephone range. Mrs. Carr was grateful, and so, it must be said, was her husband, who did not care to spend his evenings digging up Egyptians that had been a long time dead, or listening to comic operas. It was through Mrs. Carr that Leighton came to be well known in Mariona; she told her friends to ask him to call, and there were now many homes besides hers that he visited.

It sometimes occurred to Morris Leighton that he was not getting ahead in the world very fast. He knew that his salary from Carr was more than any other young lawyer of his years earned by independent practice; but it seemed to him that he ought to be doing better. He had not drawn on his mother's small resources since his first year at college; he had made his own way—and a little more—but he experienced moments of restlessness in which the difficulties of establishing himself in his profession loomed large and formidable.

An errand to a law firm in one of the fashionable new buildings that had lately raised the Mariona sky-line led him one afternoon past the office of his college classmate, Jack Balcomb. "J. Arthur Balcomb," was the inscription on the door, "Suite B, Room 1." Leighton had seen[Pg 1311] little of Balcomb for a year or more, and his friend's name on the ground-glass door arrested his eye.

Two girls were busily employed at typewriters in the anteroom, and one of them extended a blank card to Morris and asked him for his name. The girl disappeared into the inner room and came back instantly followed by Balcomb, who seized Morris's hand, dragged him in and closed the door.

"Well, old man!" Balcomb shouted. "I'm glad to see you. It's downright pleasant to have a fellow come in occasionally and feel no temptation to take his watch. Sink into yonder soft-yielding leather and allow me to offer you one of these plutocratic perfectos. Only the elect get these, I can tell you. In that drawer there I keep a brand made out of car waste and hemp rope, that does very well for ordinary commercial sociability. Got a match? All right; smoke up and tell me what you're doing to make the world a better place to live in, as old Prexy used to say at college."

"I'm digging at the law, at the same old stand. I can't say that I'm flourishing like Jonah's gourd, as you seem to be."

Morris cast his eyes over the room, which was handsomely furnished. There was a good rug on the floor and the desk and table were of heavy oak; an engraving of Thomas Jefferson hung over Balcomb's desk, and on the opposite side of the room was a table covered with financial reference books.

"Well, I tell you, old man," declared Balcomb, "you've got to fool all the people all the time these days to make it go. Those venerable whiskers around town whine about the good old times and how a young man's got to go slow but sure. There's nothing in it; and they wouldn't be in it either, if they had to start in again; no siree!"[Pg 1312]

"What is your game just now, Jack, if it isn't impertinent? It's hard to keep track of you. I remember very well that you started in to learn the wholesale drug business."

"Oh tush! don't refer to that, an thou lovest me! That is one of the darkest pages of my life. Those people down there in South High Street thought I was a jay, and they sent me out to help the shipping clerk. Wouldn't that jar you! Overalls,—and a hand truck. Wow! I couldn't get out of that fast enough. Then, you know, I went to Chicago and spent a year in a broker's office, and I guess I learned a few up there. Oh, rather! They sent me into the country to sell mining stock and I made a record. They kept the printing presses going overtime to keep me supplied. Say, they got afraid of me; I was too good!"

He stroked his vandyke beard complacently, and flicked the ash from his cigar.

"What's your line now? Real estate, mortgages, lending money to the poor? How do you classify yourself?"

"You do me a cruel wrong, Morris, a cruel wrong. You read my sign on the outer wall? Well, that's a bluff. There's nothing in real estate, per se, as old Doc Bridges used to say at college. And the loan business has all gone to the bad,—people are too rich; farmers are rolling in real money and have it to lend. There was nothing for little Willie in petty brokerages. I'm scheming—promoting—and I take my slice off of everything that passes."

"That certainly sounds well. You've learned fast. You had an ambition to be a poet when you were in college. I think I still have a few pounds of your verses in my traps somewhere."

Balcomb threw up his head and laughed in self-pity.[Pg 1313]

"I believe I was bitten with the literary tarantula for a while, but I've lived it down, I hope. Prexy used to predict a bright literary future for me in those days. You remember, when I made Phi Beta Kappa, how he took both my hands and wept over me. 'Balcomb,' he says, 'you're an honor to the college.' I suppose he'd weep again, if he knew I'd only forgotten about half the letters of the Greek alphabet,—left them, as one might say, several thousand parasangs to the rear in my mad race for daily sustenance. Well, I may not leave any vestiges on the sands of time, but, please God, I shan't die hungry,—not if I keep my health. Dear old Prexy! He was a nice old chump, though a trifle somnolent in his chapel talks."

"Well, we needn't pull the planks out of the bridge we've crossed on. I got a lot out of college that I'm grateful for. They did their best for us," said Morris.

"Oh, yes; it was well enough, but if I had it to do over, Tippecanoe wouldn't see me; not much! It isn't what you learn in college, it's the friendships you make and all that sort of thing that counts. A western man ought to go east to college and rub up against eastern fellows. The atmosphere at the freshwater colleges is pretty jay. Fred Waters left Tippecanoe and went to Yale and got in with a lot of influential fellows down there,—chaps whose fathers are in big things in New York. Fred has a fine position now, just through his college pull, and first thing you know, he'll pick up an heiress and be fixed for life. Fred's a winner all right."

"He's also an ass," said Leighton. "I remember him of old."

"An ass of the large gray and long-eared species,—I'll grant you that, all right enough; but look here, old man, you've got to overlook the fact that a fellow occasionally lifts his voice and brays. Man does not live by the spirit alone; he needs bread, and bread's getting hard to get."[Pg 1314]

"I've noticed it," replied Leighton, who had covered all this ground before in talks with Balcomb and did not care to go into it further.

"And then, you remember," Balcomb went on, in enjoyment of his own reminiscences, "I wooed the law for a while. But I guess what I learned wouldn't have embarrassed Chancellor Kent. I really had a client once. I didn't see a chance of getting one any other way, so I hired him. He was a coon. I employed him for two dollars to go to the Grand Opera House and buy a seat in the orchestra when Sir Henry Irving was giving The Merchant of Venice. He went to sleep and snored and they threw him out with rude, insolent, and angry hands after the second act; and I brought suit against the management for damages, basing my claim on the idea that they had spurned my dusky brother on account of his race, color and previous condition of servitude. The last clause was a joke. He had never done any work in his life, except for the state. He was a very sightly coon, too, now that I recall him. The show was, as I said, The Merchant of Venice, and I'll leave it to anybody if my client wasn't at least as pleasing to the eye as Sir Henry in his Shylock togs. I suppose if it had been Othello, race feeling would have run so high that Sir Henry would hardly have escaped lynching. Well, to return. My client got loaded on gin about the time the case came up on demurrer and gave the snap away, and I dropped out of the practice to avoid being disbarred. And it was just as well. My landlord had protested against my using the office at night for poker purposes, so I passed up the law and sought the asphodel fields of promotion. Les affaires font l'homme, as old Professor Garneau used to say at college. So here I am; and I'm glad I shook the law. I'd got tired of eating coffee and rolls at the Berlin bakery three times a day.[Pg 1315]

"Why, Morris, old man," he went on volubly, "there were days when the loneliness in my office grew positively oppressive. You may remember that room I had in the old Adams and Harper Block? It gave upon a courtyard where the rats from a livery stable came to disport themselves on rainy days. I grew to be a dead shot with the flobert rifle; but lawsy, there's mighty little consideration for true merit in this world! Just because I winged a couple of cheap hack horses one day, when my nerves weren't steady, the livery people made me stop, and one of my fellow tenants in the old rookery threatened to have me arrested for conducting a shooting gallery without a license. He was a dentist, and he said the snap of the rifle worried his victims."

The two typewriting machines outside clicked steadily. Some one knocked at the door.

"Come in!" shouted Balcomb.

One of the typewriter operators entered with a brisk air of business and handed a telegram to Balcomb, who tore it open nonchalantly. As he read it, he tossed the crumpled envelope over his shoulder in an absent-minded way.

"By Jove!" he exclaimed, slapping his leg as though the news were important. Then, to the girl, who waited with note-book and pencil in hand: "Never mind; don't wait. I'll dictate the answer later."

"How did it work?" he asked, turning to Leighton, who had been looking over the books on the table.

"How did what work?"

"The fake. It was a fake telegram. That girl's trained to bring in a message every time I have a caller. If the caller stays thirty minutes, it's two messages,—in other words I'm on a fifteen-minute schedule. I tip a boy in the telegraph office to keep me supplied with blanks. It's a[Pg 1316] great scheme. There's nothing like a telegram to create the impression that your office is a seething caldron of business. Old Prexy was in town the other day. I don't suppose he ever got a dose of electricity in his life unless he had been sorely bereft of a member of his family and was summoned to the funeral baked meats. Say, he must have thought I had a private wire!"

Leighton sat down and fanned himself with his hat.

"You'll be my death yet. You have the cheek of a nice, fresh, new baggage-check, Balcomb."

"Your cigar isn't burning well, Morris. Won't you try another? No? I like my guests to be comfortable."

"I'm comfortable enough. I'm even entertained. Go ahead and let me see the rest of the show."

"Oh, we haven't exactly a course of stunts here. Those are nice girls out there. I've broken them of the chewing-gum habit, and they can answer anxious inquiries at the door now without danger of strangulation."

"They seem speedy on the machine. Your correspondence must be something vast!"

"Um, yes. It has to be. Every cheap skate of a real estate man keeps one stenographer. My distinction is that I keep two. They're easy advertising. Now that little one in the pink shirt-waist that brought in the message from Mars a moment ago is a wonder of intelligence. Do you know what she's doing now?"

"Trying to break the machine I should guess, from the racket."

"Bah! It's the Lord's Prayer."

"You mean it's a sort of prayer machine."

"Not on your life. Maude hasn't any real work to do just now and she's running off the Lord's Prayer. I know by the way it clicks. When she strikes 'our daily bread' the machine always gives a little gasp. See? The rule[Pg 1317] of the office is that they must have some diddings doing all the time. The big one with red hair is a perfect marvel at the Declaration of Independence. She'll be through addressing circulars in a little while and will run off into 'All men are created equal'—a blooming lie, by the way—without losing a stroke."

"You have passed the poetry stage, beyond a doubt. But I should think the strain of keeping all this going would be wearing on your sensitive poetical nature. And it must cost something."

"Oh, yes!" Balcomb pursed his lips and stroked his fine soft beard. "But it's worth it. I'm not playing for small stakes. I'm looking for Christmas trees. Now they've got their eyes on me. These old Elijahs that have been the bone and sinew of the town for so long that they think they own it, are about done for. You can't sit in a bank here any more and look solemn and turn people down because your corn hurts or because the chinch-bugs have got into the wheat in Dakota or the czar has bought the heir apparent a new toy pistol. You've got to present a smiling countenance to the world and give the glad hand to everybody you're likely to need in your business. I jolly everybody!"

"That comes easy for you; but I didn't know you could make an asset of it."

"It's part of my working capital. Now you'd better cut loose from old man Carr and move up here and get a suite near me. I've got more than I can do,—I'm always needing a lawyer,—organizing companies, legality of bonds, and so on. Dignified work. Lots of out-of-town people come here and I'll put you in touch with them. I threw a good thing to Van Cleve only the other day. Bond foreclosure suit for some fellows in the East that I sell stuff to. They wrote and asked me the name of[Pg 1318] a good man. I thought of you—old college days and all that—but Van Cleve had just done me a good turn and I had to let him have it. But you'd better come over. You'll never know the world's in motion in that musty old hole of Carr's. You get timid and afraid to go near the water by staying on shore so long. But say, Morris, you seem to be getting along pretty well in the social push. Your name looks well in the society column. How do you work it, anyhow?"

"Don't expect me to give the snap away. The secret's valuable. And I'm not really inside; I am only peering through the pickets!"

"Tush! Get thee hence! I saw you in a box at the theater the other night,—evidently Mrs. Carr's party. There's nothing like mixing business with pleasure. Ah me!"

He yawned and stroked his beard and laughed, with a fine showing of white teeth.

"I don't see what's pricking you with small pins of envy. You were there with about the gayest crowd I ever saw at a theater; and it looked like your own party."

"Don't say a word," implored Balcomb, putting out his hand. "Members of the board of managers of the state penitentiary, their wives, their cousins and their aunts. Say, weren't those beauteous whiskers! My eye! Well, the evening netted me about five hundred plunks, and I got to see the show and to eat a good supper in the bargain. Some reformers were to appear before them that night officially, and my friends wanted to keep them busy. I was called into the game to do something,—hence these tears. Lawsy! I earned my money. Did you see those women?—about two million per cent. pure jay!"

"You ought to cut out that sort of thing; it isn't nice."

"Oh, you needn't be so virtuous. Carr keeps a whole[Pg 1319] corps of rascals to spread apple-butter on the legislature corn-bread."

"You'd better speak to him about it. He'd probably tell Mrs. Carr to ask you to dinner right away."

"Oh, that will come in time. I don't expect to do everything at once. You may see me up there some time; and when you do, don't shy off like a colt at the choo-choos. By the way, I'd like to be one of the bright particular stars of the Dramatic Club if you can fix it. You remember that amateur theatricals are rather in my line."

"I do. At college you were one of the most persistent Thespians we had, and one of the worst. But let social matters go. You haven't told me how to get rich quick yet. I haven't had the nerve to chuck the law as you have."

"Well," continued Balcomb, expansively, "a fellow has got to take what he can when he can. One swallow doesn't make a summer; one sucker doesn't make a spring; so we must catch the birdling en route or en passant, as our dear professor of modern languages used to try to get us to remark. Say, between us old college friends, I cleared up a couple of thousand last week just too easy for any use. You know Singerly, the popular undertaker,—Egyptian secret of embalming, lady and gentleman attendants, night and day,—always wears a spray of immortelles in his lapel and a dash of tuberose essence on his handkerchief. Well, Singerly and I operated together in the smoothest way you ever saw. Excuse me!" He lay back and howled. "Well, there was an old house up here on High Street just where it begins to get good; very exclusive—old families and all that. It belonged to an estate, and I got an option on it just for fun. I began taking Singerly up there to look at it. We'd measure it, and step it off, and stop and palaver on[Pg 1320] the sidewalk. In a day or two those people up there began to take notice and to do me the honor to call on me. You see, my boy, an undertaking shop—even a fashionable one—for a neighbor, isn't pleasant; it wouldn't add, as one might say, to the sauce piquante of life; and as a reminder of our mortality—a trifle depressing, as you will admit."

He took the cigar from his mouth and examined the burning end of it thoughtfully.

"I sold the option to one of Singerly's prospective neighbors for the matter of eleven hundred. He's a retired wholesale grocer and didn't need the money."

"Seems to me you're cutting pretty near the dead-line, Jack. That's not a pretty sort of hold-up. You might as well take a sandbag and lie in wait by night."

"Great rhubarb! You make me tired. I'm not robbing the widow and the orphan, but a fat old Dutchman who doesn't ask anything of life but his sauerkraut and beer."

"And you do! You'd better give your ethical sense a good tonic before you butt into the penal code."

"Come off! I've got a better scheme even than the Singerly deal. The school board's trying to locate a few schools in up-town districts. Very undesirable neighbors. I rather think I can make a couple of turns there. This is all strictly inter nos, as Professor Morton used to say in giving me, as a special mark of esteem, a couple of hundred extra lines of Virgil to keep me in o' nights."

He looked at his watch and gave the stem-key a few turns before returning it to his pocket.

"You'll have to excuse me, old man. I've got a date with Adams, over at the Central States Trust Company. He's a right decent chap when you know how to handle him. I want to get them to finance a big apartment house[Pg 1321] scheme. I've got an idea for a flat that will make the town sit up and gasp."

"Don't linger on my account, Jack. I only stopped in to see whether you kept your good spirits. I feel as though I'd had a shower bath. Come along."

Several men were waiting to see Balcomb in the outer office and he shook hands with all of them and begged them to come again, taking care to mention that he had been called to the Central States Trust Company and had to hurry away.

He called peremptorily to the passing elevator-car to wait, and as he and Leighton squeezed into it, he continued his half of an imaginary conversation in a tone that was audible to every passenger.

"I could have had those bonds, if I had wanted them; but I knew there was a cloud on them—the county was already over its legal limit. I guess those St. Louis fellows will be sorry they were so enterprising—here we are!"

And then in a lower tone to Leighton: "That was for old man Dameron's benefit. Did you see him jammed back in the corner of the car? Queer old party and as tight as a drum. When I can work off some assessable and non-interest bearing bonds on him, it'll be easy to sell Uncle Sam's Treasury a gold brick. They say the old man has a daughter who is finer than gold; yea, than much fine gold. I'm going to look her up, if I ever get time. You'd better come over soon and pick out an office. Verbum sat sapienti, as our loving teacher used to say. So long!"

Leighton walked back to his office in good humor and better contented with his own lot.[Pg 1322]

THE WICKED ZEBRA[3]

BY FRANK ROE BATCHELDER

[Pg 1323]

THE BRAKEMAN AT CHURCH

BY ROBERT J. BURDETTE

One bright winter morning, the twenty-ninth day of December, Anno Domini 1879, I was journeying from Lebanon, Indiana, where I had sojourned Sunday, to Indianapolis. I did not see the famous cedars, and I supposed they had been used up for lead-pencils, and moth-proof chests, and relics, and souvenirs; for Lebanon is right in the heart of the holy land. That part of Indiana was settled by Second Adventists, and they have sprinkled goodly names all over their heritage. As the train clattered along, stopping at every station to trade off some people who were tired of traveling for some other people who were tired of staying at home, I got out my writing-pad, pointed a pencil, and wondered what manner of breakfast I would be able to serve for the ever hungry "Hawkeye" next morning.

I was beginning to think I would have to disguise some "left-overs" under a new name, as the thrifty housekeeper knows how to do, when my colleague, my faithful yoke-fellow, who has many a time found for me a spring of water in the desert place—the Brakeman, came down the aisle of the car. He glanced at the tablet and pencil as I would look at his lantern, put my right hand into a cordial compress that abode with my fingers for ten minutes after he went away, and seating himself easily on the arm of the seat, put the semaphore all right for me by saying:

"Say, I went to church yesterday."[Pg 1324]

"Good boy," I said, "and what church did you attend?"

"Guess," was his reply.

"Some Union Mission chapel?" I ventured.

"N-no," he said, "I don't care to run on these branch roads very much. I don't get a chance to go to church every Sunday, and when I can go, I like to run on the main line, where your trip is regular, and you make schedule time, and don't have to wait on connections. I don't care to run on a branch. Good enough, I reckon, but I don't like it."

"Episcopal?" I guessed.

"Limited express!" he said, "all parlor cars, vestibuled, and two dollars extra for a seat; fast time, and only stop at the big stations. Elegant line, but too rich for a brakeman. All the trainmen in uniform; conductor's punch and lanterns silver-plated; train-boys fenced up by themselves and not allowed to offer anything but music. Passengers talk back at the conductor. Trips scheduled through the whole year, so when you get aboard you know just where you're going and how long it will take you. Most systematic road in the country and has a mighty nice class of travel. Never hear of a receiver appointed on that line. But I didn't ride in the parlor car yesterday."

"Universalist?" I suggested.

"Broad gauge," the Brakeman chuckled; "does too much complimentary business to be prosperous. Everybody travels on a pass. Conductor doesn't get a cash fare once in fifty miles. Stops at all way-stations and won't run into anything but a union depot. No smoking-car allowed on the train because the company doesn't own enough brimstone to head a match. Train orders are rather vague, though; and I've noticed the trainmen[Pg 1325] don't get along very well with the passengers. No, I didn't go on the broad gauge, though I have some good friends on that road who are the best people in the world. Been running on it all their lives."

"Presbyterian?" I hinted.

"Narrow gauge, eh?" said the Brakeman; "pretty track; straight as a rule; tunnel right through the heart of a mountain rather than go around it; spirit level grade; strict rules, too; passengers have to show their tickets before they get on the train; cars a little bit narrow for sleepers; have to sit one in a seat and no room in the aisle to dance. No stop-over tickets allowed; passenger must go straight through to the station he's ticketed for, or stay off the car. When the car's full, gates are shut; cars built at the shops to hold just so many, and no more allowed on. That road is run right up to the rules and you don't often hear of an accident on it. Had a head-on collision at Schenectady union station and run over a weak bridge at Cincinnati, not many years ago, but nobody hurt, and no passengers lost. Great road."

"May be you rode with the Agnostics?" I tried.

The Brakeman shook his head emphatically.

"Scrub road," he said, "dirt road-bed and no ballast; no time-card, and no train dispatcher. All trains run wild and every engineer makes his own time, just as he pleases. A sort of 'smoke-if-you-want-to' road. Too many side tracks; every switch wide open all the time, switchman sound asleep and the target-lamp dead out. Get on where you please and get off when you want. Don't have to show your tickets, and the conductor has no authority to collect fare. No, sir; I was offered a pass, but I don't like the line. I don't care to travel over a road that has no terminus.

"Do you know, I asked a division superintendent where[Pg 1326] his road run to, and he said he hoped to die if he knew. I asked him if the general superintendent could tell me, and he said he didn't believe they had a general superintendent, and if they had, he didn't know any more about the road than the passengers did. I asked him who he reported to, and he said, 'Nobody.' I asked a conductor who he got his orders from, and he said he didn't take no orders from any living man or dead ghost. And when I asked the engineer who gave him orders, he said he'd just like to see any man on this planet try to give him orders, black-and-white or verbal; he said he'd run that train to suit himself or he'd run it into the ditch. Now, you see, I'm not much of a theologian, but I'm a good deal of a railroad man, and I don't want to run on a road that has no schedule, makes no time, has no connections, starts anywhere and runs nowhere, and has neither signal man, train dispatcher or superintendent. Might be all right, but I've railroaded too long to understand it."

"Did you try the Methodist?"

"Now you're shoutin'!" he cried with enthusiasm; "that's the hummer! Fast time and crowds of passengers! Engines carry a power of steam, and don't you forget it. Steam-gauge shows a hundred and enough all the time. Lively train crews, too. When the conductor shouts 'All a-b-o-a-r-d!' you can hear him to the next hallelujah station. Every train lamp shines like a head-light. Stop-over privileges on all tickets; passenger can drop off the train any time he pleases, do the station a couple of days and hop on to the next revival train that comes thundering along with an evangelist at the throttle. Good, whole-souled, companionable conductors; ain't a road on earth that makes the passengers feel more at home. No passes issued on any account; everybody[Pg 1327] pays full traffic rate for his own ticket. Safe road, too; well equipped; Wesleyanhouse air brakes on every train. It's a road I'm fond of, but I didn't begin this week's run with it."

I began to feel that I was running ashore; I tried one more lead:

"May be you went with the Baptists?"

"Ah, ha!" he shouted, "now you're on the Shore line! River Road, eh? Beautiful curves, lines of grace at every bend and sweep of the river; all steel rail and rock ballast; single track, and not a siding from the round-house to the terminus. Takes a heap of water to run it, though; double tanks at every station, and there isn't an engine in the shops that can run a mile or pull a pound with less than two gauges. Runs through a lovely country—river on one side and the hills on the other; and it's a steady climb, up grade all the way until the run ends where the river begins, at the fountain head. Yes, sir, I'll take the River Road every time for a safe trip, sure connections, good time, and no dust blowing in when you open a window. And yesterday morning, when the conductor came around taking up fares with a little basket punch, I didn't ask him to pass me; I paid my fare like a little Jonah—twenty-five cents for a ninety-minute run, with a concert by the passengers thrown in. I tell you what it is, Pilgrim, never mind your baggage, you just secure your passage on the River Road if you want to go to—"

But just here the long whistle announced a station, and the Brakeman hurried to the door, shouting—

"Zions-VILLE! ZIONS-ville! All out for Zionsville! This train makes no stops between here and Indianapolis!"[Pg 1328]

HOW MR. TERRAPIN LOST HIS BEARD

BY ANNE VIRGINIA CULBERTSON

The "cook-house" stood at some little distance from the "big house," and every evening after supper it was full of light and noise and laughter. The light came from the fire on the huge hearth, above which hung the crane and the great iron pots which Eliza, the cook, declared were indispensable in the practice of her art. To be sure, there was a cook-stove, but 'Liza was wedded to old ways and maintained there was nothing "stove cooked" that could hope to rival the rich and nutty flavor of ash cake, or greens "b'iled slow an' long over de ha'th, wid a piece er bacon in de pot."

The noise and laughter came from a circle of dusky and admiring friends, for Aunt 'Liza was a great favorite with everybody on the plantation, and though hunchbacked and homely, had, nevertheless, had her pick, as she was fond of boasting, of the likeliest looking men on the place; and though she had been twice wedded and twice widowed, aspirants were not wanting for the position now vacant for a third time. Indeed, not long before, a member of the family, on going to the cook-house to see why dinner was so late, had discovered one Sam, the burly young ox-cart driver, on his knees, pleading very earnestly with the elderly and humpbacked little cook, while dinner simmered on and on, unnoticed and forgotten. When remonstrated with she said that she was "'bleeged ter have co'tin' times ez well ez de res' er folks," and intimated that in affairs of the heart these things were apt to happen at any time or place, and that[Pg 1329] if a gentleman chose an inopportune moment "'twan't her fault," and no one could, with any show of reason, expect her not to pay attention to him. She ruled everybody, her white folks included, though just how she did it no one could say, unless she was one of those commanding spirits and born leaders who sometimes appear even in the humblest walks of life. It is possible that her uncommonly strong will compelled the affections of her male admirers, but it is also possible that she condescended to flatter, and it is certain that she fed them well.

One night, between supper and bedtime, the children heard the sound of a banjo proceeding from the cook-house. They had never ventured into Aunt 'Liza's domain before, but the plinketty-plunk of the banjo, the sound of patting and the thud of feet keeping time to the music drew them irresistibly. Aunt Nancy was there, in the circle about the embers, as was also her old-time foe, Aunt 'Phrony, and the banjo was in the hands of Tim, a plow-boy, celebrated as being the best picker for miles around. Lastly, there were Aunt 'Liza and her latest conquest, Sam, whose hopes she could not have entirely quenched or he would not have beamed so complacently on the assembled company.

There was a hush as the three little heads appeared in the doorway, but the children begged them to go on, and so Tim picked away for dear life and Sam did a wonderful double-shuffle with the pigeon-wing thrown in. Then Tim sang a plantation song about "Cindy Ann" that ran something like this:

At the reference to a "widdy" he winked at the others and looked significantly at Sam and Aunt 'Liza. Then he declared it was the turn of the ladies to amuse the gentlemen. Aunt Nancy and Aunt 'Phrony cried, "Hysh! Go 'way, man! W'at ken we-all do? Done too ol' fer foolishness; leave dat ter de gals!" But 'Liza was not inclined to leave the entertainment of gentlemen to "gals," whom she declared to be, for the most part, "wu'fless trunnel-baid trash."[Pg 1331]

"Come, come, Sis' 'Phrony, an' you, too, Sis' Nancy," said she, "you knows dar ain' nu'rr pusson on de place kin beat you bofe in der marter uv tellin' tales. I ain' nuver have de knack myse'f, but I knows a good tale w'en I years hit, an' I bin gittin' myse'f fixed fer one uver sence you comed in."

The children added their petitions, seconded by Tim and Sam. Aunt Nancy looked as if she were feeling around in the dusk of half-forgotten things for a dimly remembered story, perceiving which the nimbler-witted Aunt 'Phrony made haste to say that she believed she knew a story which might please the company if they were not too hard to suit. They politely protested that such was far from being the case, whereupon she began the story of how the Terrapin lost his beard.

"Um-umph!" snorted Aunt Nancy, "who uver year tell uv a tarr'pin wid a by'ud!"

"Look-a-yer, ooman," said 'Phrony, "who tellin' dis, me er you? You s'pose I'se talkin' 'bout de li'l ol' no-kyount tarr'pins dey has dese days? Naw, suh! I'se tellin' 'bout de ol' time Tarr'pin whar wuz a gre't chieft an' a big fighter, an' w'ensomuver tu'rr creeturs come roun' an' try ter pay him back, he jes' drord his haid in his shell an' dar he wuz. Dish yer ain' no ol' nigger tale, neener, dish yer a Injun tale whar my daddy done tol' me w'en I wan't no bigger'n Miss Janey. He say dat sidesen de by'ud, Tarr'pin had big wattles hangin' down beneaf his chin, jes' lak de tukkey-gobblers has dese days. Him an' Mistah Wi'yum Wil'-tukkey wuz mighty good fren's dem times, an' Tukkey he thought Tarr'pin wuz a monst'ous good-lookin' man. He useter mek gre't 'miration an' say, 'Mistah Tarry-long Tarr'pin, you sut'n'y is a harnsum man. Dar ain' nu'rr creetur in dese parts got such a by'ud an' wattles ez w'at you is.'[Pg 1332]

"Den Tarr'pin he'd stroke down de by'ud an' swell out de wattles an' say, 'Sho! sho! Mistah Tukkey, you done praise dese yer heap mo'n w'at dey is wuf,' but all de same he wuz might'ly please', fer dar's nuttin' lak a li'l bit er flatt'ry fer ilin' up de j'ints an' mekin' folks limbersome in der feelin's.

"Tukkey git ter thinkin' so much 'bout de by'ud an' de wattles dat seem ter him ez ef he kain't git long no-hows lessen he have some fer hisse'f, 'kase in dem days de gobblers ain' have none. He study an' he study, but he kain't see whar he kin git 'em, an' de mo' he study de mo' he hone atter 'em. Las' he git so sharp set atter 'em dat he ain' kyare how he git 'em, jes' so he git 'em, an' den he mek up his min' he gwine tek 'em 'way f'um Tarr'pin. So one day w'en he met up wid him in de road he stop him an' bob his haid an' mek his manners mighty p'litely, an' he say, sezee, 'Mawnin', Mistah Tarry-long, mawnin'. How you come on dis day? I ain' hatter ax you, dough, 'kase you done look so sprucy wid yo' by'ud all comb' out an' yo' wattles puff' up. I wish, suh, you lemme putt 'em on fer a minnit, so's't I kin see ef I becomes 'em ez good ez w'at you does.'

"Ol' man Tarr'pin mighty easy-goin' an' commodatin', so he say, 'W'y, sut'n'y, Mistah Tukkey, you kin tek 'em an' welcome fer a w'iles.' So Tukkey he putts 'em on an' moseys down ter de branch ter look at hisse'f in de water. 'Whoo-ee!' sezee ter hisse'f, 'ain' I de caution in dese yer fixin's! I'se saw'y fer de gals now, I sut'n'y is, 'kase w'at wid my shape an' dish yer by'ud an' wattles, dar gwine be some sho'-'nuff heart-smashin' roun' dese diggin's, you year me sesso!'

"Den he go struttin' back, shakin' de by'ud an' swellin' put de wattles an' jes' mo'n steppin' high an' prancin' w'ile he sing:[Pg 1333]

"Den he say, sezee, 'Mistah Tarr'pin, please, suh, ter lemme keep dese yer? I b'lieve I becomes 'em mo'n w'at you does, 'kase my neck so long an' thin seem lak I needs 'em ter set hit off mo'n w'at you does wid dat shawt li'l neck er yo'n whar you keeps tuck 'way in yo' shell half de time, anyways. Sidesen dat, you is sech a runt dat you g'long draggin' de by'ud on de groun', an' fus' news you know hits 'bleeged ter be wo' out. You bes' lemme have hit, 'kase I kin tek good kyare uv hit.'

"Den Tarr'pin say, sezee, 'I lak ter 'commodate you, Mistah Tukkey, but I ain' see how I kin. I done got so use ter runnin' my fingers thu de by'ud an' spittin' over hit w'en I'se settin' roun' thinkin' er talkin' dat I dunno how I kin do widout hit, an' I kain't git long, no-how, widout swellin' up de wattles w'en I git tetched in my feelin's. Sidesen dat, I kin tek kyare er de by'ud, ef I is a runt; I bin doin' it a good w'ile, an' she ain' wo' out yit. So please, suh, ter han' me over my fixin's.'

"'Not w'iles I got any wind lef' in me fer runnin',' sez de Tukkey, sezee, an' wid dat he went a-scootin', ol' man Tarr'pin atter him, hot-foot. Dey went scrabblin' up de mountains an' down de mountains, an' 'twuz pull Dick, pull devil, fer a w'ile. Dey kain't neener one uv 'em climb up ve'y fas', but w'en dey git ter de top, Tukkey he fly down an' Tarr'pin he jes' natchully turn over an' roll down. But Tukkey git de start an' keep hit. W'en Tarr'pin roll to de bottom uv a mountain den he'd see Tukkey at de top er de nex' one. Dey kep' hit up dis-a-way 'cross fo' ridges, an' las' Tarr'pin he plumb wo' out an' he see he wan't gwine ketch up at dat rate, so he gin up fer dat day. Den he go an' hunt up de[Pg 1334] cunjerers an' ax 'em fer ter he'p him. He say, 'Y'all know dat by'ud an' wattles er mine? Well, I done loan 'em to Mistah Wi'yum Wil'-tukkey, 'kase he wuz my fren' an' he done ax me to. An' now he turn out ter be no-kyount trash, an' w'at I gwine do? You bin knowin' I is a slow man, an' if I kain't git some he'p, I hatter say good-by by'ud an' wattles.'"

"What are 'cunjerers,' Aunt 'Phrony?" said Ned.

"Well now, honey," said she, "I dunno ez I kin jes' rightly tell you, but deys w'at de Injuns calls 'medincin'-men,' an' dey doctors de sick folks an' he'ps de hunters ter git game an' de gals ter git beaux, an' putts spells on folks an' mek 'em do jes' 'bout w'at dey want 'em to. An' so dese yer cunjerers dey goes off by derse'fs an' has a confab an' den dey come back an' tell Mistah Tarr'pin dat dey reckon dey done fix Mistah Tukkey dis time.

"'W'at you done wid him?' sezee.

"'We ain' ketch 'im,' dey ses, 'we lef' dat fer you, dat ain' ow' bizness, but we done fix him up so't you kin do de ketchin' yo'se'f.'

"'W'at has you done to him, den?' sezee.

"'Son', dey ses, 'we done putt a lot er li'l bones in his laigs, an' dat gwine slow him up might'ly, an' we 'pends on you ter do de res', 'kase we knows dat you is a gre't chieft.'

"Den Tarr'pin amble long 'bout his bizness an' neener stop ner res' ontwel he met up wid Tukkey onct mo'. He ax fer his by'ud an' wattles ag'in, but Tukkey jes' turnt an' stept out f'um dat, Tarr'pin atter him. But seem lak de cunjerers thought Mistah Tarr'pin wuz faster'n w'at he wuz, er dat Mistah Tukkey 'z slower'n w'at he wuz, 'kase Tarr'pin ain' nuver ketch up wid him yit, an' w'ats mo', de tarr'pins is still doin' widout by'uds an' wattles an' de gobblers is still wearin' 'em an' swellin'[Pg 1335] roun' showin' off ter de gals, steppin' ez high ez ef dem li'l bones w'at de cunjerers putt dar wan't still in der laigs, an' struttin' lak dey wuz sayin' ter ev'y pusson dey meets:

THE CRITIC

BY WILLIAM J. LAMPTON

THE ASSOCIATED WIDOWS

BY KATHARINE M. ROOF

The confirmed bachelor sat apart, fairly submerged by a sea of Sunday papers; yet a peripheral consciousness of the ladies' presence was revealed in his embryonic smile.

He folded over a voluminous sheet containing an account of the latest murder, and glanced at a half-page picture, labeled, "The Scene of the Crime."

"Was there ever yet a woman that could keep a secret," he demanded, apparently of the newspaper. "Now, if this poor fellow had only kept his little plans to himself—but, of course, he had to go and tell some woman."

"Looks like the man didn't know how to keep his secret that time," returned Mrs. Pendleton with a smile calculated to soften harsh judgments against her sex.

"There are some secrets woman can keep," observed Elsie Howard. Her gaze happened to rest upon Mrs. Pendleton's golden hair.

"For instance," demanded the confirmed bachelor. (His name was Barlow.)

"Oh—her age for one thing." Elsie withdrew her observant short-sighted eyes from Mrs. Pendleton's crowning glory, and a smile barely touched the corners of her expressively inexpressive mouth. Mrs. Pendleton glanced up, faintly suspicious of that last remark.

Mr. Barlow laughed uproariously. In the two years that he had been a "guest" in Mrs. Howard's boarding-house he had come to regard Miss Elsie as a wit, and it[Pg 1339] was his habit—like the Italians at the opera—to give his applause before the closing phrases were delivered.

"I guess that's right. You hit it that time. That's one secret a woman can keep." He chuckled appreciatively.

Mrs. Pendleton laughed less spontaneously than usual and said, "It certainly was a dangerous subject," that "she had been looking for silver hairs amongst the gold herself lately." And again Elsie's eyes were attracted to the hairs under discussion. For three months now she had questioned that hair. At night it seemed above reproach in its infantile fairness, but in the crude unkind daylight there was a garish insistence about it that troubled the eye.

At that moment the door opened and Mrs. Hilary came in with her bonnet on. She glanced around with frigid greeting.

"So I'm not late to dinner after all. I had thought you would be at table. The tram was so slow I was sorry I had not walked and saved the fare." She spoke with an irrational rising and falling of syllables that at once proclaimed her nationality. She was a short, compact little woman with rosy cheeks, abundant hair and a small tight mouth. Mrs. Hilary was a miniature painter by choice and a wife and mother by accident. She was subject to lapses in which she unquestionably forgot the twins' existence. She recalled them suddenly now.

"Has any one seen Gladys and Gwendolen? Dear, dear, I wonder where they are. They wouldn't go to church with me. Those children are such a responsibility."

"But they are such happy children," said gentle little Mrs. Howard, who had come in at the beginning of this speech. In her heart Mrs. Howard dreaded the long-legged, all-pervasive twins, but she pitied the widowed[Pg 1340] and impoverished little artist. "So sad," she was wont to say to her intimates in describing her lodger, "a young widow left all alone in a foreign country."

"But one would hardly call America a foreign country to an Englishwoman," one friend had interpolated at this point.

"Yes, I know," Mrs. Howard had acknowledged, "but she seems foreign. Her husband was an American, I believe, and he evidently left her with almost nothing. He must have been very unkind to her, she has such a dislike of Americans. She wasn't able to give the regular price for the rooms, but I couldn't refuse her—I felt so sorry for her."

Mrs. Howard liked to "feel sorry for" people. Yet she was apt to find herself at sea in attempting to sympathize with Mrs. Hilary. She was a sweet-faced, tired-looking little woman with a vague smile and dreamy eyes. About five years ago Mrs. Howard had had "reverses" and had been forced by necessity to live to violate the sanctity of her hearth and home; grossly speaking, she had been obliged to take boarders, no feasible alternative seeming to suggest itself. The old house in Eleventh Street, in which she had embarked upon this cheerless career, had never been a home for her or her daughter. Yet an irrepressible sociability of nature enabled her to find a certain pleasure in the life impossible to her more reserved daughter.

As they all sat around now in the parlor, into which the smell of the Sunday turkey had somehow penetrated, a few more guests wandered in and sat about provisionally on the impracticable parlor furniture, waiting for the dinner signal. Mrs. Howard bravely tried to keep up the simulation of social interchange with which she ever[Pg 1341] pathetically strove to elevate the boarding-house intercourse into the decency of a chosen association.

Suddenly there came a thump and a crash against the door and the twins burst in, their jackets unbuttoned, their dusty picture hats awry.

"Oh! mater, mater!" they cried tumultuously, dancing about her.

"Such sport, mater. We fed the elephant."

"And the rabbits—"

"And a monkey carried off Gwendolen's gloves—"

"Children," exclaimed Mrs. Hilary impotently, looking from one to the other, "where have you been?" (She pronounced it bean.)

"To the park, mater—"

"To see the animals—"

"Oh, mater, you should see the ducky little baby lion!"

"What is it that they call you?" inquired a perpetually smiling young kindergartner who had just taken possession of a top-floor hall-room.

Mrs. Hilary glanced at her slightingly.

"What is it that they call me? Why, mater, of course."

"Ah, yes," the girl acquiesced pleasantly. "I remember now; it's English, of course."

"Oh, no," returned Mrs. Hilary instructively, "it's not English; it's Latin."

The kindergartner was silent. Mrs. Pendleton suppressed a chuckle that strongly suggested her "mammy." Mr. Barlow grinned and Elsie Howard's mouth twitched.

"They are such picturesque children," Mrs. Howard put in hastily. "I wonder you don't paint them oftener."

"I declare I just wish I could paint," Mrs. Pendleton contributed sweetly, "I think it's such pretty work."

Mrs. Hilary was engrossed in the task of putting the twins to rights.[Pg 1342]

"I don't know what to do with them, they are quite unmanageable," she sighed. "It's so bad for them—bringing them up in a lodging-house."

Mrs. Howard flushed and Mrs. Pendleton's eyes flashed. The dinner bell rang and Elsie Howard rose with a little laugh.

"An English mother with American children! What do you expect, Mrs. Hilary?"

Mrs. Hilary was busy retying a withered blue ribbon upon the left side of Gladys' brow. She looked up to explain:

"They are only half-American, you know. But their manners are getting quite ruined with these terrible American children."

Then they filed down into the basement dining-room for the noon dinner.

"Horrid, rude little Cockney," Mrs. Pendleton whispered in Elsie Howard's ear.

The girl smiled faintly. "Oh, she doesn't know she is rude. She is just—English."

Mrs. Howard, over the characterless soup, wondered what it was about the little English artist that seemed so "different." Conversation with Mrs. Hilary developed such curious and unexpected difficulties. Mrs. Howard looked compassionately over at the kindergartner who, with the hopefulness of inexperience, started one subject after another with her unresponsive neighbor. What quality was it in Mrs. Hilary that invariably brought both discussion and pleasantry to a standstill? Elsie, upon whom Mrs. Howard depended for clarification of her thought, would only describe it as "English." In her attempts to account for this alien presence in her household, Mrs. Howard inevitably took refuge in the recollection of Mrs. Hilary's widowhood. This moving[Pg 1343] thought occurring to her now caused her to glance in the direction of Mrs. Pendleton's black dress and her face lightened. Mrs. Pendleton was of another sort. Mrs. Pendleton had proved, as Mrs. Howard always expressed it, "quite an acquisition to our circle." She felt almost an affection for the merry, sociable talkative Southern woman, with her invariable good spirits, her endless fund of appropriate platitude and her ready, superficial sympathy. Mrs. Pendleton had "come" through a cousin of a friend of a friend of Mrs. Howard's, and these vague links furnished unlimited material for conversation between the two women. Mrs. Pendleton was originally from Savannah, and the names which flowed in profusion from her lips were of unimpeachable aristocracy. Pendleton was a very "good name" in the South, Mrs. Howard had remarked to Elsie, and went on to cite instances and associations.

Besides those already mentioned, the household consisted of three old maids, who had been with Mrs. Howard from her first year; a pensive art student with "paintable" hair; a deaf old gentleman whose place at table was marked by a bottle of lithia tablets; a chinless bank clerk, who had jokes with the waitress, and a silent man who spoke only to request food.

Mr. Barlow occupied, and frankly enjoyed the place between Miss Elsie and Mrs. Pendleton. He found the widow's easy witticisms, stock anecdotes and hackneyed quotations of unfailing interest and her obvious coquetry irresistible. Mr. Barlow took life and business in a most un-American spirit of leisure. He never found fault with the food or the heating arrangements, and never precipitated disagreeable arguments at table. All things considered, he was probably the most contented spirit in the house.[Pg 1344]

The talk at table revolved upon newspaper topics, the weather, the health of the household, and a comparison of opinions about plays and actresses. At election times it was strongly tinged with politics, and on Sundays, popular preachers were introduced, with some expression as to what was and was not good taste in the pulpit. Among the feminine portion a fair amount of time was devoted to a review of the comparative merits of shops.

Mrs. Pendleton's conversation, however, had a somewhat wider range, for she had traveled. Just what topics were favored in those long undertone conversations with Mr. Barlow only Elsie Howard could have told, as the seat on the other side of the pair was occupied by the deaf old gentleman. There were many covert glances and much suppressed laughter, but neither of the two old maids opposite were able to catch the drift of the low-voiced dialogue, so it remained a tantalizing mystery. Mrs. Pendleton, when pleased to be general in her attentions, proved to be, as Mrs. Howard had said, "an acquisition." She spoke most entertainingly of Egypt, of Japan and Hawaii. Yet all these experiences seemed tinged with a certain sadness, as they had evidently been associated with the last days of the late Mr. Pendleton. They had crossed the Pyrenees when "poor Mr. Pendleton was so ill he had to be carried every inch of the way." In Egypt, "sometimes it seemed like he couldn't last another day. But I always did say 'while there is life there is hope,'" she would recall pensively, "and the doctors all said the only hope for his life was in constant travel, and so we were always, as you might say, seeking 'fresh fields and pastures new.'"

Then Mrs. Howard's gentle eyes would fill with sympathy. "Poor Mrs. Pendleton," she would often say to Elsie after one of these distressing allusions. "How ter[Pg 1345]rible it must have been. Think of seeing some one you love dying that way, by inches before your eyes. She must have been very fond of him, too. She always speaks of him with so much feeling."

"Yes," said Elsie with untranslatable intonation. "I wonder what he died of."

"I don't know," returned her mother regretfully. She had no curiosity, but she had a refined and well-bred interest in diseases. "I never heard her mention it and I didn't like to ask."

"Poor Mrs. Howard," Mrs. Pendleton was wont to say with her facile sympathy. "So hard for her to have to take strangers into her home. I believe she was left without anything at her husband's death; mighty hard for a woman at her age."

"How long has her husband been dead?" the other boarder to whom she spoke would sometimes inquire.

Mrs. Pendleton thought he must have been dead some time, although she had never heard them say, exactly. "You never hear Elsie speak of him," she added, "so I reckon she doesn't remember him right well."

As the winter wore on the tendency to tête-à-tête between Mrs. Pendleton and Mr. Barlow became more marked. They lingered nightly in the chilly parlor in the glamour of the red lamp after the other guests had left. It was discovered that they had twice gone to the theater together. The art student had met them coming in late. As a topic of conversation among the boarders the affair was more popular than food complaints. A subtile atmosphere of understanding enveloped the two. It became so marked at last that even Mrs. Hilary perceived it—although Elsie always insisted that Gladys had told her.

One afternoon in the spring, as Mrs. Pendleton was standing on the door-step preparing to fit the latch-key[Pg 1346] into the lock, the door opened and a man came out uproariously, followed by Gladys and Gwendolen, who, in some inexplicable way, always had the effect of a crowd of children. The man was tall and not ill-looking. Mrs. Pendleton was attired in trailing black velveteen, a white feather boa, and a hat covered with tossing plumes, and the hair underneath was aggressively golden. A potential smile hovered about her lips and her glance lingered in passing. Inside the house she bent a winning smile upon Gwendolen, who was the less sophisticated of the two children.

"Who's your caller, honey?"

"That's the pater," replied Gwendolen with her mouth full of candy. "He brought us some sweets. You may have one if you wish."

"Your—your father," translated Mrs. Pendleton with a gasp. She was obliged to lean against the wall for support.

The twins nodded, their jaws locked with caramel.

"He doesn't come very often," Gladys managed to get out indistinctly. "I wish he would."

"I suppose his business keeps him away," suggested Mrs. Pendleton.

Gladys glanced up from a consideration of the respective attractions of a chocolate cream and caramel.

"He says it is incompatibility of humor," she repeated glibly. Gladys was more than half American.

"Of humor!" Mrs. Pendleton's face broke up into ripples of delight. She flew at once to Mrs. Howard's private sitting room, arriving all out of breath and exploded her bomb immediately.

"My dear, did you know that Mrs. Hilary is not a widow?"

"Not a widow!" repeated Mrs. Howard with dazed eyes.[Pg 1347]

"I met her husband right now at the door. He was telling the children good-by. He isn't any more dead than I am."

"Not dead!" repeated Mrs. Howard, collapsing upon the nearest chair with all the prostration a news bearer's heart could desire. "And she was always talking about what he used to do and used to think and used to say. Why—why I can't believe it."

"True as preachin'," declared Mrs. Pendleton, adding that you could have knocked her down with a feather when she discovered it.

Elsie Howard came into her mother's room just then and Mrs. Pendleton repeated the exciting news, adding, "Gladys says they don't live together because of incompatibility of humor!"

Elsie smiled and remarked that it certainly was a justifiable ground for separation and unkindly went off, leaving the subject undeveloped.

The next day Mrs. Howard had a caller. It was the friend whose cousin had a friend that had known Mrs. Pendleton. In the process of conversation the caller remarked casually:

"So Mrs. Pendleton has got her divorce at last."

Mrs. Howard smiled vaguely and courteously.

"Some connection of our Mrs. Pendleton? I don't think I have heard her mention it. Dear me, isn't it dreadful how common divorce is getting to be!"

The guest stared.

"You don't mean to say—why, my dear Mrs. Howard—is it possible you don't know? It is your Mrs. Pendleton."

Mrs. Howard remained looking at her friend. Once or twice her lips moved but no words came.

"Her husband is dead," she said at last, faintly.[Pg 1348]

The caller laughed. "Then he must have died yesterday. Why, didn't you know that was the reason she spent last year in Colorado?"

"For her husband's health," gasped Mrs. Howard, clinging to the last shred of her six months' belief in Mrs. Pendleton's widowhood. "I always had an impression that it was there he died."

The other woman laughed heartlessly. "Did she tell you he was dead?"

Mrs. Howard collected her scattered faculties and tried to think.

"No," she said at last. "Now that you speak of it, I don't believe she ever did. But she certainly gave that impression. She seemed to be always telling of his last illness and his last days. She never actually mentioned the details of his death—but then, how could she—poor thing?"

"She couldn't, of course. That would have been asking too much." Mrs. Howard's guest went off again into peals of unseemly laughter.

When her caller had left, Mrs. Howard climbed up to the chilly skylight room occupied by her daughter and dropped upon the bed, exclaiming:

"Well, I never would have believed it of Mrs. Pendleton!"

Elsie, who was standing before her mirror, regarded her mother in the glass.

"What's up. Has she eloped with Billie Barlow at last?"

Mrs. Howard tried to say it, but became inarticulate with emotion. After five minutes of preamble and exclamation, her daughter was in possession of the fact.

"That explains about her hair," was Elsie's only comment. "I am so relieved to have it settled at last."[Pg 1349]

"Why didn't she tell me?" wailed Mrs. Howard.

"Oh, people don't always tell those things."

Mrs. Howard was silent.

As they passed the parlor door on their way down to dinner, Mrs. Pendleton's merry laugh rang out and Elsie caught a glimpse of the golden hair under the red lamp and the fugitive glimpse of Mr. Barlow's bald spot.

About two days later, as the girl came in from an afternoon's shopping, and was on her way upstairs, her mother called to her. Something in the sound of it attracted her attention. She hurried down the few steps and into her mother's room. Mrs. Howard was sitting over by the window in the fading light, with a strange look upon her face. An open telegram lay in her lap. Elsie went up to her quickly.

"What is it, mother?"

Mrs. Howard handed her the telegram.

"Your father," she said.

Elsie Howard read the simple announcement in silence. Then she looked up, the last trace of an old bitterness in her faint smile.

"We will miss him," she said.

"Elsie!" cried her mother. It was a tone the girl had never heard from her before. Her eyes fell.

"No, it wasn't nice to say it. I am sorry. But I can't forget what life was with him." She raised her eyes to her mother's. "It was simply hell, mother; you can't have forgotten. You have said it yourself so often. We can not deny that it is a relief to know—"

"Hush, Elsie, never let me hear you say anything like that again."

"Forgive me, mother," said the girl with quick remorse. "I never will. I don't think I have ever felt that death makes such things so different, and I didn't realize how you would—look at it."[Pg 1350]

"My child, he was your father," said Mrs. Howard in a low voice. Then Elsie saw the tears in her mother's eyes.

"Such a shock to her," Mrs. Pendleton murmured, sympathetically, to Elsie. "I know, Miss Elsie; I can feel for her—" Elsie mechanically thought of the last hours of Mr. Pendleton, then recalled herself with a start. "Death always is a shock," Mrs. Pendleton finished gracefully, "even when one most expects it. You must let me know if there is anything I can do."

Later in the evening she communicated the astonishing news to Mrs. Hilary, who ejaculated freely: "Only fancy!" and "How very extraordinary!"

"Didn't you think he had been dead a hundred years?" exclaimed Mrs. Pendleton.

"One never can tell in the states," responded Mrs. Hilary conservatively. "Divorce is so common over here. It isn't the thing at all in England, you know."

Mrs. Pendleton stared.

"But they were not divorced, only separated. Do you never do that—in England?"

"Divorced people are not received at court, you know," explained Mrs. Hilary.

Mrs. Pendleton's glance lingered upon the Englishwoman's immobile face and a laugh broke into her words.

"But when you are in Rome, you do as the Romans—is that it, Mrs. Hilary?" But the shot glanced off harmlessly from the thick armor of British literalness.

"In Rome divorce doesn't exist at all," she graciously informed her companion. "The Romish church does not permit it, you know."

The American woman looked at the Englishwoman more in sorrow than in anger.[Pg 1351]

"How," she reflected, "is one to be revenged like a lady upon an Englishwoman?"

It was about a week later that Mrs. Pendleton, finding herself alone with Mrs. Howard and Elsie, made the final announcement.

"I hope you-all will be ready to dance at my wedding next month. It's going to be very quiet, but I couldn't think of being married without you and Miss Elsie—and Mr. Barlow, he feels just like I do about it."[Pg 1352]

WOMEN AND BARGAINS

BY NINA R. ALLEN

Show me the woman who in her heart of hearts does not delight in a bargain, and I will tell you that she is a dead woman.

I who write this, after having triumphantly passed bargain counters of every description, untempted by ribbons worth twenty-five cents but selling for nineteen, insensible to dimities that had sold for nineteen cents but were offered at six and a fourth cents a yard, and—though I have a weakness for good cooking utensils—blind to the attractions of a copper tea-kettle whose former price was now cut in two, at last fell a victim to a green-and-white wicker chair.

This is how it happened. I asked the price. Eight dollars, replied the shop-keeper. No. It was a ten-dollar chair. But he had said eight. It was a mistake. Nevertheless he would keep his word. I could have it for eight. What heart of woman could resist a bargain like this? Besides, I thought such honesty ought to be encouraged. It is but too uncommon in this wicked world. And—well, I really wanted the chair. How could a woman help wanting it when she found that the salesman had made an error of two dollars? It was a ten-dollar chair, the shop-keeper repeated. I saw the tag marked "Lax, Jxxx Mxx." There could be no doubt of it.

I gazed and gazed, but finally went on, like the seamen of Ulysses, deafening myself to the siren-voice. And[Pg 1353] though I had hesitated, I might not have been lost; but returning by the same route, I saw a neighboring druggist rush into that store bareheaded, as I now suppose to change a bill. Need I say that I then thought he had come for my chair? Need I say that I then and there bought that chair?

Thus have I brought shame on a judicious parent—not my mother—who has conscientiously labored to teach me that the way of the bargain-hunter is hard.

As well might man attempt to deprive the cat of its mew or the dog of its bark as to eliminate from the female breast the love of bargains. It has been burned in with the centuries. Eve, poor soul, doubtless never knew the happiness of swarming with other women round a big table piled with remnants of rumpled table-linen, mis-mated towels and soiled dresser-scarfs, or the pleasure of carrying off the bolt of last fall's ribbon on which another woman had her eye; nor had she the proud satisfaction of bringing home to her unfortunate partner a shirt with a bosom like a checker-board, that had been marked down to sixty-three cents. But history, since her day, is not lacking in bargains of various kinds, of which woman has had her share, though no doubt Anniversary Sales, Sensational Mill End Sales, and Railroad Wreck Sales are comparatively modern.

A woman's pleasure in a good bargain is akin to the rapture engendered in the feminine bosom by successful smuggling. It is perhaps a purer joy. The satisfaction of acquiring something one does not need, or of buying an article which one may have some use for in the future, simply because it is cheap or because Mrs. X. paid seventeen cents more for the same thing at a bargain-sale, can not be understood by a mere man.

Once in a while some stupid masculine creature en[Pg 1354]deavors to show his wife that she is losing the use of her money by tying it up in embroideries for decorating cotton which is still in the fields of the South, or laying it out in summer dress-goods when snow-storms can not be far distant. The use of her money forsooth! What is money for except to spend? And if she didn't buy embroideries and dimities, she would purchase something else with it.

So she goes on hunting bargains, or rather profiting by those that come in her way, for generally it is not necessary to search for them. These little snares of the merchant are only too common in this age, when everything from cruisers to clothes-pins and pianos to prunes may often be had at a stupendous sacrifice.

A man usually goes to a shop where he believes that he will run little or no risk of being deceived in the quality of the goods, even though prices be higher there than at some other places. A woman thinks she knows a bargain when she sees it.

She is aware that the store-keeper has craftily spread his web of bargains, hoping that when lured into his shop she will buy other things not bargains. But she determines beforehand that she will not be cajoled into purchasing anything but the particular bargain of her desire,—unless—unless she sees something else which she really wants. And generally, she sees something else which she really wants.

Most women are tolerably good judges of a bargain, and therefore have some ground for their confidence in themselves. I have seen a Christmas bargain-table containing china and small ornaments of various wares, completely honeycombed of its actual bargains by veteran bargain-hunters, who left unpurchased as if by instinct goods from the regular stock, offered at usual prices.[Pg 1355]

Bargains are a boon to the woman of moderate means. The deepest joys of bargain-hunting are not known to the rich, though they by no means disdain a bargain. To them is not given the delight of saving long, and waiting for a bargain sale, and at last possessing the thin white china or net curtains ardently desired and still out of reach at regular prices. But they have some compensation. They have the advantage not only of ready money, which makes a bargain available at any time, but also that of leisure.

While my lady of the slender purse is still getting the children ready for school, or exhorting Bridget not to burn the steak that will be entrusted to her tender mercies, they can swoop down upon a bargain and bear it away victoriously.

A fondness for bargains is not without its dangers, for with some people the appetite grows with what it feeds on, to the detriment of their purses as well as of their outlook on life. To them, all the world becomes a bargain-counter.

A few years ago in a city which shall be nameless, two women looked into the windows of a piano-store. In one, was an ancient instrument marked "1796"; in the other, a beautiful modern piano labeled "1896." "Why," said one of the gazers to her companion, indicating the latter, "I'd a good deal rather pay the difference for this one, wouldn't you?"

This is no wild invention of fiction, but a bald fact. So strong had the ruling passion become in that feminine heart.

Upon a friend of mine, the bargain habit has taken so powerful a hold that almost any sort of a bargain appeals to her. She is the owner of a fine parrot, yet not long ago she bought another, which had cost fifteen dollars,[Pg 1356] but was offered to her for ten. Its feathers were bedraggled and grimy, for it had followed its mistress about like a dog; it proved to be so cross that at first it had to be fed from the end of a stick; and though represented as a brilliant talker, its discourse was found to be limited to "Wow!" and "Rah! Rah!"—but it was a bargain.

To be sure, she didn't really need two parrots, but had she not saved five dollars on this one?

The most elusive kind of bargain is that set forth in alluring advertisements as a small lot, perhaps three, four, or two dozen articles of a kind, offered at a price unprecedentedly low.

When you reach the store, you are generally told that they—whatever they may be—are all gone. The other woman so often arrives earlier than you, apparently, that finally you come to doubt their existence.

Once in a while, if you are eminent among your fellows by some gift of nature, as is an acquaintance of mine, you may chase down one of these will-o'-the-wisps.

He—yes, it is he, for what woman would own to a number ten foot even for the sake of a bargain?—saw a fire sale advertised, with men's shoes offered at a dollar a pair. He went to the store. Sure enough, a fire had occurred somewhere, but not there. It was sufficiently near, however, for a fire sale.

A solitary box was brought out, whose edges were scorched, as by a match passed over them; within was a pair of number ten shoes. Number tens alone, whether one pair or more, I wot not, represented their gigantic fire sale. And I can not say how many men had come only to be confronted with tens, before this masculine Cinderella triumphantly filled their capacious maws with his number ten feet, and gleefully carried off what may have been the only bargain in the shop.[Pg 1357]

In spite of the suspicions of some doubting Thomases who regard all bargains as snares and delusions, it is certain that many real bargains are offered among the numerous things advertised as such; but to profit by them, I may add, one must have an aptitude, either natural or acquired, for bargains.

P.S.—I have just learned that my wicker chair would not have been very cheap at six dollars.[Pg 1358]

FABLE

BY RALPH WALDO EMERSON

THE WOMAN-HATER REFORMED

BY ROY FARRELL GREENE

HOW MR. TERRAPIN LOST HIS PLUMAGE AND WHISTLE

BY ANNE VIRGINIA CULBERTSON

"Well," said Janey, as Aunt 'Phrony finished telling of the loss of Mr. Terrapin's beard, "I saw a terrapin the other day, and it didn't look as though it ever had had a beard or wattles. I thought it was real ugly."

"Law, chil'," answered the story-teller, "you kain't tell w'at one'r dese yer creeturs bin in de times pas' jes' by lookin' at 'em now. W'y, de day's bin w'en ol' man Tarr'pin wuz plumb harnsum. He done bin trick' out er mo'n jes' his by'ud an' wattles, I kin tell you."

"Oh, please do tell us!" cried Janey, and little Kit came and leaned on her knees and looked up into her face and echoed, "'Es, please to tell us."

Thus besieged, Aunt 'Phrony consented to tell how the Terrapin lost his plumage and his whistle.

"I done tol' you," said she. "Tarr'pin wuz onct a harnsum man, an' dat de sho'-'nuff trufe, fer he had nice, sof' fedders all over his body an' a fine, big, spreadin' tail, an' his eyes wuz mighty bright an' his voice wuz de cle'res' whustle you uver yearn. He wuz a gre't man in dem days, I tell you dat, an' his house wuz chock full er all sorts er fine fixin's. He had sof' furs ter set on an' long strings er shells fer money, an clo'es all imbroider' wid dyed pokkypine quills, an' he had spears an' bows an' arrers an' deer-hawns, an' I dunno w'at all sidesen dat.

"In dem days de Quail wuz a homely, no-kyount cree[Pg 1361]tur, wid sca'cely any fedders, an' a shawt, stumpy tail, an' no voice wuf speakin' uv. He wuz po', too, an' nob'dy tuck much notuss uv him, jes' call him 'dat 'ar ol' Bob White,' an' he go wannerin' up an' down de kyountry all by his lonesome.

"One day he come 'long pas' Mistah Tarr'pin's house, an' he peek in thu de do', he did, an' w'en he see all de fine doin's, seem lak he kain't tek his eye 'way f'um de crack. Den he seed Tarr'pin comin' down de road home, an' he 'low ter hisse'f, he did, dat dish yer de harnsumes' man w'at he uver seed, an' he be puffickly sassified ef he cu'd look jes' lak dat. He git mo' an' mo' enviable uv 'im an' tuck ter hangin' 'roun' de naberhood, peekin' an' peerin' in at Tarr'pin w'enuver he git de chanct. Las' he say ter hisse'f dat he jes' natchully 'bleeged ter have dem fedders an' tail an' whustle, but he ain' knowin' jes' how ter git 'em, so he g'long off ter ax de he'p uv a wise ol' Wolf whar live 'way, 'way up on de mountain an' whar wuz one'r dem cunjerers I done tol' you 'bout. Ez he went 'long he wuz fixin' up a tale ter tell Wolf, an' w'en he git ter de kyave whar de cunjerer live he knock an' Wolf 'spon', 'Come in!' in sech a deep, growly voice dat li'l Quail felt kind er skeery, an' he feel mo' skeery yit w'en he go hoppin' in an' see Wolf settin' dar wid bones strowed all roun' him, an' showin' dem long, white toofs er his ev'y time he open his mouf. But he perch hisse'f up in front er Wolf, an' he say in a voice dat wuz right trim'ly, 'Howdy, Uncle Wolf, howdy! I done comed all de way up yer ter ax yo' he'p, 'kase I knows dar ain' nair' nu'rr man on dis mountain whar knows half ez much ez w'at you does. Please, suh, tell me w'at ter do.'

"'Bob White, you is a li'l ol' fool,' sez Wolf, sezee, 'how kin I tell you w'at ter do w'en you ain' tol' me w'at 'tis you wants?'[Pg 1362]

"Den Quail he git li'l mo' pearter, an' he try ter mek Wolf feel please', so he say, 'Laws-a-mussy! Uncle Wolf, I done fergit dat, but I reckon I do so 'kase you is dat smart I thought you mought know widout me tellin'.'

"'Drap dat foolishness,' sez Wolf, sezee, 'an' lemme know w'at you comed atter.' But all de same he wan't too smart ner too ol' ter feel please' wid de flatt'ry; show me de man whar is; lots uv 'em gits ketched by dat, nuttin' mo' ner less," and here Aunt 'Phrony cast a scornful glance at Nancy, who answered it by a toss of the head.

"Well, den," she resumed, "Quail start inter de meanness he bin hatchin' up, an' he say, sezee, 'Uncle Wolf, deys a man down dar below whar gittin' ter be dangersome. He's rich an' goodlookin', an' a gre't chieft an' a sho'-'nuff fighter, an' he kin do 'bout w'at he please wid tu'rr creeturs. A man lak dat boun' ter wu'k mischief. Now, suh, ef you sesso, 'pears ter me hit be mighty good notion ter tek 'way his good looks an' dat pleasin' voice whar he uses ter 'suade de people wid, an' gin 'em ter some er de quiet an' peace'ble folks whar ain' all de time stickin' derse'fs ter de front an' tryin' ter lead de people. Now yer I is, you bin knowin' me dis good w'ile, an' you knows my numbility an' submissity, an' ef you mek me de one ter do de deed an' den give me de fixin's fer my trouble, I gwine feel dat I kain't ve'y well refuge 'em.' Right dar he putt his haid on one side an' look up at Wolf mighty meek an' innercent.

"Wolf he say he gwine think 'bout hit, an' he tell Quail ter come back in seven days an' git de arnser. So Quail he go hippitty-hoppin' down de mountains, thinkin' he bin mighty smart, an' wunnerin' ef he kin stan' hit ter wait seven mo' days befo' he rob po' ol' Tarr'pin.

"Wolf he went off higher yit, ter de top er de mountain fer ter ax de 'pinion er seven urr wolfs mo' older[Pg 1363] an' wiser dan w'at he wuz. Dey talked an' dey 'sputed toge'rr fer seven days an' nights. Den Wolf came back an' Quail made has'e up ter see him ag'in. He say Quail mus' go ter Tarr'pin's house at midnight an' do jes' lak he tell 'im to, er hit be wusser fer him, stidder better. Quail lissen an' say he gwine do jes' lak he tell 'im, an' wid dat he g'long off. Jes' at de stroke er midnight, w'en de bats wuz a-flyin' an' de squinch-owls hootin' an' de jacky-my-lanturns trabellin' up an' down, he knock on Mistah Tarr'pin's do' an' gin out dat he wuz a trabeller whar comed a fur ways an' wuz pow'ful tired an' hongry.

"Tarr'pin wuz a kin' man, so he 'vited him in an' gin him sump'n ter eat an' drink an' made him set down on de sof' furs, 'kase he felt saw'y fer any pusson so po' an' ugly ez w'at Quail wuz. Den he say, 'You mus' be tired atter yo' journeyin', lemme rub you a w'iles.' He rub de ugly, rough creetur fer so long time, an' den Quail sez, sezee, 'You sut'n'y is kin', but I ain' wanter tire you out. I is res'ed now, so please, suh, ter lemme rub you a li'l.' He rub an' he rub Tarr'pin wid one han', an' all de time he wuz rubbin' hisse'f wid de urr. Dat-a-way he rub all de fedders offen Tarr'pin onter his own se'f. Den he rub down Tarr'pin's tail 'twel 'twan't nuttin' but a li'l roun', sharp-p'inted stump, an' at de same time he wuz rubbin' his own tail wid tu'rr han' an' puttin' Tarr'pin's fine, spreadin' tail onter his own li'l stump. Hit wuz plumb dark, so't Mistah Tarr'pin ain' see w'at bin done, an' sidesen dat he wuz pow'ful sleepy fum de rubbin'. Den Quail say he 'bleeged ter lay down 'kase he mus' git him a early start in de mawnin'.

"Befo' sun-up he wuz stirrin' an' he say he mus' be gittin' 'long. Tarr'pin go ter de do' wid him an' den Quail say, sezee, 'Mistah Tarr'pin, I year you has a monst'ous fine whustle, I lak mighty well ter year hit befo' I go.'[Pg 1364]

"'W'y sut'n'y,' sez de Tarr'pin, sezee, an' wid dat he whustle long an' loud. Quail lissen at him wid all his years, an' den he say: 'Well, dog my cats, ef I ain' beat! Yo' voice is de prezack match er mine.

"'You don't sesso! lemme year you whustle,' sez Tarr'pin, sezee.

"'Dat I will,' sez Quail, 'but lemme go off li'l ways an' show you how fer I kin mek myse'f yearn,' sezee. He sesso 'kase he'z gittin' mighty 'feerd dat Tarr'pin gwine fin' out his fedders wuz gone. So he go 'way off inter de bushes an' whustle, an' sho' nuff, 'twuz jes' lak Mistah Tarr'pin's voice. Den Tarr'pin try ter whustle back, but lo, beholst you! his voice clean gone, nuttin' lef' but a li'l hiss, an' hit done stay dat-a-way clean ontwel dis day. 'Twuz gittin' daylight, an' he look down uv a suddint an' dar he wuz! wid nair' a smidgin' uv a fedder on his back. He feel so bad he go inter de house an' cry ontwel his eyes wuz so raid dat dey stayed dat-a-way uver sence.

"Den Mis' Tarr'pin she say, 'Is you a chieft, er is you a ol' ooman? Whyn't you go atter dat man an' gin him a lambastin' an' git back w'at b'long to you?' He feel kind er 'shame', so he pull hisse'f toge'rr an' go out ter see w'at he kin do. 'Fo' long he fin' out dat de cunjerers bin at wu'k, so he know he gotter have he'p, an' he go an' git all tu'rr tarr'pins ter he'p him. Dey went ter de ol' wolfs, de cunjerers, an' dey ses: 'We is a slow people an' you is a swif people, but nemmine dat, we dyar's you-all to a race, an' ef you-all wins, den you kin kill we-all; an' ef we-all wins, den we gwine exescoot you. An' ef you ain't dast ter tek up dis dyar', den ev'yb'dy gwine know you is cowerds.'

"Co'se de wolfs tucken de dyar' up, an' hit wuz 'greed de race wuz ter be over seben mountain ridges, an' dat[Pg 1365] hit wuz ter be run 'twix' one wolf an' one tarr'pin, de res' ter look on.

"Wen de day come, ol' Tarr'pin he tuck an' fix up dis trick; he git six urr tarr'pins whar look jes' lak him, an' he hide one away in de bresh on top uv each er de six mountains, an' he hide hisse'f away on top er de sebent'. Jes' befo' Wolf git ter de top er de fus' mountain, de tarr'pin whar wuz hidin' dar crawl outen de bresh an' git ter de top fus' an' gin a whoop, an' went over a li'l ways an' hid in de bresh ag'in. Wolf think dat mighty cur'ous, but he keep on, an' 'twuz jesso at ev'y one, an' at de las' ridge co'se Tarr'pin jes' walk hisse'f outen de bresh an' gin a gre't whoop ter let ev'yb'dy know he done won de race.

"Den de tarr'pins mek up der min's ter kill de wolfs by fire, so dey pen 'em all in a big kyave on de mountain an' dey bring bresh an' wood an' pile in front uv hit, a pile mos' ez high ez de mountain, an' den dey set fire to hit, an' de wolfs howl an' de fire hit spit an' sputter an' hiss an' crack an' roar, an' all de creeturs on de mountain set up a big cry an' run dis-a-way an' dat ter git outen de fire; dey wuz plumb 'stracted, an' hit soun' lak all de wil' beas'es in creation wuz turnt aloose an' tryin' w'ich kin yell de loudes'. But de tarr'pins jes' drord inter der shells an' sot dar safe an' soun', an' watched de fire burn an' de smoke an' de flame rollin' inter de kyave.

"De wolfs dey howled an' dey howled an' dey howled, an' de li'l ones dey cried an' dey cried an' dey cried, an' las' de ol' ones felt so bad 'bout de chillen dat dey 'gun ter kill 'em off so's't dey ain' suffer no mo'. Wen de tarr'pins see dat, dey wuz saw'y, an' dey mek up der min's ter let de res' off, so dey turnt 'em aloose f'um de kyave. But lots uv 'em had died in dar, an' dat huccome[Pg 1366] dar ain' so many wolfs now ez dey useter be. Some wuz nearer ter de fire dan tu'rrs an' got swinged, an' some got smoked black, an' dat w'y, ontwel dis day, some wolfs is black an' some gray an' some white, an' some has longer, bushier tails dan tu'rrs. Dey got so hoarse wid all dat cryin' dat der voices bin nuttin' but a howl uver sence.

"Quail he year w'at gwine on, an' he tucken hisse'f outen dat kyountry fas' ez his laigs cu'd kyar' him, so Tarr'pin nuver got back de fedders ner de whustle, an' ef you goes out inter de fiel' mos' any day you kin see Quail gwine roun' in de stolen fedders an' year him whustle:

jes' ez sassy ez ef he bin doin' right all his days, an' ez ef he bin raised wid dat voice stidder stealin' hit way f'um ol' man Tarr'pin."[Pg 1367]

BY BAY AND SEA

BY JOHN KENDRICK BANGS

BILL NATIONS

BY BILL ARP

You never knowd Bill, I rekun. Hes gone to Arkensaw, and I don't know whether hes ded or alive. He was a good feller, Bill was, as most all whisky drinkers are. Me and him both used to love it powerful—especially Bill. We soaked it when we could git it, and when we coudent we hankered after it amazingly. I must tell you a little antidote on Bill, tho I dident start to tell you about that.

We started on a little jurney one day in June, and took along a bottle of "old rye," and there was so many springs and wells on the road that it was mighty nigh gone before dinner. We took our snack, and Bill drained the last drop, for he said we would soon git to Joe Paxton's, and that Joe always kept some.

Shore enuff Joe dident have a drop, and we concluded, as we was mighty dry, to go on to Jim Alford's, and stay all night. We knew that Jim had it, for he always had it. So we whipped up, and the old Bay had to travel, for I tell you when a man wants whiskey everything has to bend to the gittin' of it. Shore enuff Jim had some. He was mity glad to see us, and he knowd what we wanted, for he knowd how it was hisself. So he brought out an old-fashend glass decanter, and a shugar bowl, and a tumbler, and a spoon, and says he, "Now, boys, jest wait a minit till you git rested sorter, for it ain't good to take whiskey on a hot stomack. I've jest been readin' a piece[Pg 1369] in Grady's newspaper about a frog—the darndest frog that perhaps ever come from a tadpole. It was found up in Kanetucky, and is as big as a peck measure. Bill, do you take this paper and read it aloud to us. I'm a poor hand to read, and I want to hear it. I'll be hanged if it ain't the darndest frog I ever hearn of." He laid the paper on my knees, and I begun to read, thinkin' it was a little short anticdote, but as I turned the paper over I found it was mighty nigh a column. I took a side glance at Bill, and I saw the little dry twitches a jumpin' about on his countenance. He was mighty nigh dead for a drink. I warent so bad off myself, and I was about half mad with him for drainin' the bottle before dinner; so I just read along slow, and stopped two or three times to clear my throat just to consume time. Pretty soon Bill got up and commenced walkin' about, and he would look at the dekanter like he would give his daylights to choke the corn juice out of it. I read along slowly. Old Alford was a listnin' and chawin' his tobakker and spittin' out of the door. Bill come up to me, his face red and twitchin', and leanin' over my shoulder he seed the length of the story, and I will never forgit his pitiful tone as he whispered, "Skip some, Bill, for heaven's sake skip some."

My heart relented, and I did skip some, and hurried through, and we all jined in a drink; but I'll never forgit how Bill looked when he whispered to me to "skip some, Bill, skip some." I've got over the like of that, boys, and I hope Bill has, too, but I don't know. I wish in my soul that everybody had quit it, for you may talk about slavery, and penitentiary, and chain-gangs, and the Yankees, and General Grant, and a devil of a wife, but whiskey is the worst master that ever a man had over him. I know how it is myself.

But there is one good thing about drinkin'. I almost[Pg 1370] wish every man was a reformed drunkard. No man who hasn't drank liker knows what a luxury cold water is. I have got up in the night in cold wether after I had been spreein' around, and gone to the well burnin' up with thirst, feeling like the gallows, and the grave, and the infernal regions was too good for me, and when I took up the bucket in my hands, and with my elbows a tremblin' like I had the shakin' ager, put the water to my lips; it was the most delicious, satisfyin', luxurius draft that ever went down my throat. I have stood there and drank and drank until I could drink no more, and gone back to bed thankin' God for the pure, innocent, and coolin' beverig, and cursin' myself from my inmost soul for ever touchin' the accursed whisky. In my torture of mind and body I have made vows and promises, and broken 'em within a day. But if you want to know the luxury of cold water, get drunk, and keep at it until you get on fire, and then try a bucket full with your shirt on at the well in the middle of the night. You won't want a gourd full—you'll feel like the bucket ain't big enuf, and when you begin to drink an earthquake couldn't stop you. My fathers, how good it was! I know a hundred men who will swear to the truth of what I say: but you see its a thing they don't like to talk about. It's too humiliatin'.

But I dident start to talk about drinkin'. In fact, I've forgot what I did start to tell you. My mind is sorter addled now a days, anyhow, and I hav to jes let my tawkin' tumble out permiskuous. I'll take another whet at it afore long, and fill up the gaps.[Pg 1371]

THE SKELETON IN THE CLOSET

BY EDWARD EVERETT HALE

(This paper was first published in the Galaxy, in 1866.)

I see that an old chum of mine is publishing bits of confidential Confederate History in Harper's Magazine. It would seem to be time, then, for the pivots to be disclosed on which some of the wheelwork of the last six years has been moving. The science of history, as I understand it, depends on the timely disclosure of such pivots, which are apt to be kept out of view while things are moving.

I was in the Civil Service at Richmond. Why I was there, or what I did, is nobody's affair. And I do not in this paper propose to tell how it happened that I was in New York in October, 1864, on confidential business. Enough that I was there, and that it was honest business. That business done, as far as it could be with the resources intrusted to me, I prepared to return home. And thereby hangs this tale, and, as it proved, the fate of the Confederacy.

For, of course, I wanted to take presents home to my family. Very little question was there what these presents should be,—for I had no boys nor brothers. The women of the Confederacy had one want, which overtopped all others. They could make coffee out of beans; pins they had from Columbus; straw hats they braided quite well with their own fair hands; snuff we could get better than you could in "the old concern." But we had no hoop-[Pg 1372]skirts,—skeletons, we used to call them. No ingenuity had made them. No bounties had forced them. The Bat, the Greyhound, the Deer, the Flora, the J.C. Cobb, the Varuna, and the Fore-and-Aft all took in cargoes of them for us in England. But the Bat and the Deer and the Flora were seized by the blockaders, the J.C. Cobb sunk at sea, the Fore-and-Aft and the Greyhound were set fire to by their own crews, and the Varuna (our Varuna) was never heard of. Then the State of Arkansas offered sixteen townships of swamp land to the first manufacturer who would exhibit five gross of a home-manufactured article. But no one ever competed. The first attempts, indeed, were put to an end, when Schofield crossed the Blue Lick, and destroyed the dams on Yellow Branch. The consequence was, that people's crinolines collapsed faster than the Confederacy did, of which that brute of a Grierson said there was never anything of it but the outside.

Of course, then, I put in the bottom of my new large trunk in New York, not a "duplex elliptic," for none were then made, but a "Belmonte," of thirty springs, for my wife. I bought, for her more common wear, a good "Belle-Fontaine." For Sarah and Susy each I got two "Dumb-Belles." For Aunt Eunice and Aunt Clara, maiden sisters of my wife, who lived with us after Winchester fell the fourth time, I got the "Scotch Harebell," two of each. For my own mother I got one "Belle of the Prairies" and one "Invisible Combination Gossamer." I did not forget good old Mamma Chloe and Mamma Jane. For them I got substantial cages, without names. With these, tied in the shapes of figure eights in the bottom of my trunk, as I said, I put in an assorted cargo of dry-goods above, and, favored by a pass, and Major Mulford's courtesy on the flag-of-truce boat, I arrived safely at Richmond before the autumn closed.[Pg 1373]

I was received at home with rapture. But when, the next morning, I opened my stores, this became rapture doubly enraptured. Words can not tell the silent delight with which old and young, black and white, surveyed these fairy-like structures, yet unbroken and unmended.

Perennial summer reigned that autumn day in that reunited family. It reigned the next day, and the next. It would have reigned till now if the Belmontes and the other things would last as long as the advertisements declare; and, what is more, the Confederacy would have reigned till now, President Davis and General Lee! but for that great misery, which all families understand, which culminated in our great misfortune.

I was up in the cedar closet one day, looking for an old parade cap of mine, which, I thought, though it was my third best, might look better than my second best, which I had worn ever since my best was lost at the Seven Pines. I say I was standing on the lower shelf of the cedar closet, when, as I stepped along in the darkness, my right foot caught in a bit of wire, my left did not give way in time, and I fell, with a small wooden hat-box in my hand, full on the floor. The corner of the hat-box struck me just below the second frontal sinus, and I fainted away.

When I came to myself I was in the blue chamber; I had vinegar on a brown paper on my forehead; the room was dark, and I found mother sitting by me, glad enough indeed to hear my voice, and to know that I knew her. It was some time before I fully understood what had happened. Then she brought me a cup of tea, and I, quite refreshed, said I must go to the office.

"Office, my child!" said she. "Your leg is broken above the ankle; you will not move these six weeks. Where do you suppose you are?"

Till then I had no notion that it was five minutes since[Pg 1374] I went into the closet. When she told me the time, five in the afternoon, I groaned in the lowest depths. For, in my breast pocket in that innocent coat, which I could now see lying on the window-seat, were the duplicate despatches to Mr. Mason, for which, late the night before, I had got the Secretary's signature. They were to go at ten that morning to Wilmington, by the Navy Department's special messenger. I had taken them to insure care and certainty. I had worked on them till midnight, and they had not been signed till near one o'clock. Heavens and earth, and here it was five o'clock! The man must be half-way to Wilmington by this time. I sent the doctor for Lafarge, my clerk. Lafarge did his prettiest in rushing to the telegraph. But no! A freshet on the Chowan River, or a raid by Foster, or something, or nothing, had smashed the telegraph wire for that night. And before that despatch ever reached Wilmington the navy agent was in the offing in the Sea Maid.

"But perhaps the duplicate got through?" No, breathless reader, the duplicate did not get through. The duplicate was taken by Faucon, in the Ino. I saw it last week in Dr. Lieber's hands, in Washington. Well, all I know is, that if the duplicate had got through, the Confederate government would have had in March a chance at eighty-three thousand two hundred and eleven muskets, which, as it was, never left Belgium. So much for my treading into that blessed piece of wire on the shelf of the cedar closet, up stairs.

"What was the bit of wire?"

Well, it was not telegraph wire. If it had been, it would have broken when it was not wanted to. Don't you know what it was? Go up in your own cedar closet, and step about in the dark, and see what brings up round your ankles. Julia, poor child, cried her eyes out about it.[Pg 1375] When I got well enough to sit up, and as soon as I could talk and plan with her, she brought down seven of these old things, antiquated Belmontes and Simplex Elliptics, and horrors without a name, and she made a pile of them in the bedroom, and asked me in the most penitent way what she should do with them.

"You can't burn them," said she; "fire won't touch them. If you bury them in the garden, they come up at the second raking. If you give them to the servants, they say, 'Thank-e, missus,' and throw them in the back passage. If you give them to the poor, they throw them into the street in front, and do not say, 'Thank-e.' Sarah sent seventeen over to the sword factory, and the foreman swore at the boy, and told him he would flog him within an inch of his life if he brought any more of his sauce there; and so—and so," sobbed the poor child, "I just rolled up these wretched things, and laid them in the cedar closet, hoping, you know, that some day the government would want something, and would advertise for them. You know what a good thing I made out of the bottle corks."

In fact, she had sold our bottle corks for four thousand two hundred and sixteen dollars of the first issue. We afterward bought two umbrellas and a cork-screw with the money.

Well, I did not scold Julia. It was certainly no fault of hers that I was walking on the lower shelf of her cedar closet. I told her to make a parcel of the things, and the first time we went to drive I hove the whole shapeless heap into the river, without saying mass for them.

But let no man think, or no woman, that this was the end of troubles. As I look back on that winter, and on the spring of 1865 (I do not mean the steel spring), it seems to me only the beginning. I got out on crutches at[Pg 1376] last; I had the office transferred to my house, so that Lafarge and Hepburn could work there nights, and communicate with me when I could not go out; but mornings I hobbled up to the Department, and sat with the Chief, and took his orders. Ah me! shall I soon forget that damp winter morning, when we all had such hope at the office. One or two of the army fellows looked in at the window as they ran by, and we knew that they felt well; and though I would not ask Old Wick, as we had nicknamed the Chief, what was in the wind, I knew the time had come, and that the lion meant to break the net this time. I made an excuse to go home earlier than usual; rode down to the house in the Major's ambulance, I remember; and hopped in, to surprise Julia with the good news, only to find that the whole house was in that quiet uproar which shows that something bad has happened of a sudden.

"What is it, Chloe?" said I, as the old wench rushed by me with a bucket of water.

"Poor Mr. George, I 'fraid he's dead, sah!"

And there he really was,—dear handsome, bright George Schaff,—the delight of all the nicest girls of Richmond; he lay there on Aunt Eunice's bed on the ground floor, where they had brought him in. He was not dead,—and he did not die. He is making cotton in Texas now. But he looked mighty near it then. "The deep cut in his head" was the worst I then had ever seen, and the blow confused everything. When McGregor got round, he said it was not hopeless; but we were all turned out of the room, and with one thing and another he got the boy out of the swoon, and somehow it proved his head was not broken.

No, but poor George swears to this day it were better it had been, if it could only have been broken the right[Pg 1377] way and on the right field. For that evening we heard that everything had gone wrong in the surprise. There we had been waiting for one of those early fogs, and at last the fog had come. And Jubal Early had, that morning, pushed out every man he had, that could stand; and they lay hid for three mortal hours, within I don't know how near the picket line at Fort Powhatan, only waiting for the shot which John Streight's party were to fire at Wilson's Wharf, as soon as somebody on our left centre advanced in force on the enemy's line above Turkey Island stretching across to Nansemond. I am not in the War Department, and I forget whether he was to advance en barbette or by échelon of infantry. But he was to advance somehow, and he knew how; and when he advanced, you see, that other man lower down was to rush in, and as soon as Early heard him he was to surprise Powhatan, you see; and then, if you have understood me, Grant and Butler and the whole rig of them would have been cut off from their supplies, would have had to fight a battle for which they were not prepared, with their right made into a new left, and their old left unexpectedly advanced at an oblique angle from their centre, and would not that have been the end of them?

Well, that never happened. And the reason it never happened was, that poor George Schaff, with the last fatal order for this man whose name I forget (the same who was afterward killed the day before High Bridge), undertook to save time by cutting across behind my house, from Franklin to Green Streets. You know how much time he saved,—they waited all day for that order. George told me afterward that the last thing he remembered was kissing his hand to Julia, who sat at her bedroom window. He said he thought she might be the last woman he ever saw this side of heaven. Just after that,[Pg 1378] it must have been, his horse—that white Messenger colt old Williams bred—went over like a log, and poor George was pitched fifteen feet head-foremost against a stake there was in that lot. Julia saw the whole. She rushed out with all the women, and had just brought him in when I got home. And that was the reason that the great promised combination of December, 1864, never came off at all.

I walked out in the lot, after McGregor turned me out of the chamber, to see what they had done with the horse. There he lay, as dead as old Messenger himself. His neck was broken. And do you think I looked to see what had tripped him? I supposed it was one of the boys' bandy holes. It was no such thing. The poor wretch had tangled his hind legs in one of those infernal hoop-wires that Chloe had thrown out in the piece when I gave her her new ones. Though I did not know it then, those fatal scraps of rusty steel had broken the neck that day of Robert Lee's army.

That time I made a row about it. I felt too badly to go into a passion. But before the women went to bed,—they were all in the sitting-room together,—I talked to them like a father. I did not swear. I had got over that for a while, in that six weeks on my back. But I did say the old wires were infernal things, and that the house and premises must be made rid of them. The aunts laughed,—though I was so serious,—and tipped a wink to the girls. The girls wanted to laugh, but were afraid to. And then it came out that the aunts had sold their old hoops, tied as tight as they could tie them, in a great mass of rags. They had made a fortune by the sale,—I am sorry to say it was in other rags, but the rags they got were new instead of old,—it was a real Aladdin bargain. The new rags had blue backs, and were numbered, some[Pg 1379] as high as fifty dollars. The rag-man had been in a hurry, and had not known what made the things so heavy. I frowned at the swindle, but they said all was fair with a peddler,—and I own I was glad the things were well out of Richmond. But when I said I thought it was a mean trick, Lizzie and Sarah looked demure, and asked what in the world I would have them do with the old things. Did I expect them to walk down to the bridge themselves with great parcels to throw into the river, as I had done by Julia's? Of course it ended, as such things always do, by my taking the work on my own shoulders. I told them to tie up all they had in as small a parcel as they could, and bring them to me.

Accordingly, the next day, I found a handsome brown paper parcel, not so very large, considering, and strangely square, considering, which the minxes had put together and left on my office table. They had a great frolic over it. They had not spared red tape nor red wax. Very official it looked, indeed, and on the left-hand corner, in Sarah's boldest and most contorted hand, was written, "Secret service." We had a great laugh over their success. And, indeed, I should have taken it with me the next time I went down to the Tredegar, but that I happened to dine one evening with young Norton of our gallant little navy, and a very curious thing he told us.

We were talking about the disappointment of the combined land attack. I did not tell what upset poor Schaff's horse; indeed, I do not think those navy men knew the details of the disappointment. O'Brien had told me, in confidence, what I have written down probably for the first time now. But we were speaking, in a general way, of the disappointment. Norton finished his cigar rather thoughtfully, and then said: "Well, fellows, it is not worth while to put in the newspapers, but what do you[Pg 1380] suppose upset our grand naval attack, the day the Yankee gunboats skittled down the river so handsomely?"

"Why," said Allen, who is Norton's best-beloved friend, "they say that you ran away from them as fast as they did from you."

"Do they?" said Norton, grimly. "If you say that, I'll break your head for you. Seriously, men," continued he, "that was a most extraordinary thing. You know I was on the Ram. But why she stopped when she stopped I knew as little as this wineglass does; and Callender himself knew no more than I. We had not been hit. We were all right as a trivet for all we knew, when, skree! she began blowing off steam, and we stopped dead, and began to drift down under those batteries. Callender had to telegraph to the little Mosquito, or whatever Walter called his boat, and the spunky little thing ran down and got us out of the scrape. Walter did it right well; if he had had a monitor under him he could not have done better. Of course we all rushed to the engine-room. What in thunder were they at there? All they knew was they could get no water into her boiler.

"Now, fellows, this is the end of the story. As soon as the boilers cooled off they worked all right on those supply pumps. May I be hanged if they had not sucked in, somehow, a long string of yarn, and cloth, and, if you will believe me, a wire of some woman's crinoline. And that French folly of a sham Empress cut short that day the victory of the Confederate navy, and old Davis himself can't tell when we shall have such a chance again!"

Some of the men thought Norton lied. But I never was with him when he did not tell the truth. I did not mention, however, what I had thrown into the water the last time I had gone over to Manchester. And I changed my[Pg 1381] mind about Sarah's "secret-service" parcel. It remained on my table.

That was the last dinner our old club had at the Spotswood, I believe. The spring came on, and the plot thickened. We did our work in the office as well as we could; I can speak for mine, and if other people—but no matter for that! The third of April came, and the fire, and the right wing of Grant's army. I remember I was glad then that I had moved the office down to the house, for we were out of the way there. Everybody had run away from the Department; and so, when the powers that be took possession, my little sub-bureau was unmolested for some days. I improved those days as well as I could,—burning carefully what was to be burned, and hiding carefully what was to be hidden. One thing that happened then belongs to this story. As I was at work on the private bureau,—it was really a bureau, as it happened, one I had made Aunt Eunice give up when I broke my leg,—I came, to my horror, on a neat parcel of coast-survey maps of Georgia, Alabama, and Florida. They were not the same Maury stole when he left the National Observatory, but they were like them. Now I was perfectly sure that on that fatal Sunday of the flight I had sent Lafarge for these, that the President might use them, if necessary, in his escape. When I found them, I hopped out and called for Julia, and asked her if she did not remember his coming for them. "Certainly," she said, "it was the first I knew of the danger. Lafarge came, asked for the key of the office, told me all was up, walked in, and in a moment was gone."

And here, on the file of April 3d, was Fafarge's line to me:

"I got the secret-service parcel myself, and have put[Pg 1382] it in the President's own hands. I marked it, 'Gulf coast,' as you bade me."

What could Lafarge have given to the President? Not the soundings of Hatteras Bar. Not the working-drawings of the first monitor. I had all these under my hand. Could it be,—"Julia, what did we do with that stuff of Sarah's that she marked secret service?"

As I live, we had sent the girls' old hoops to the President in his flight.

And when the next day we read how he used them, and how Pritchard arrested him, we thought if he had only had the right parcel he would have found the way to Florida.

That is really the end of this memoir. But I should not have written it, but for something that happened just now on the piazza. You must know, some of us wrecks are up here at the Berkeley baths. My uncle has a place near here. Here came to-day John Sisson, whom I have not seen since Memminger ran and took the clerks with him. Here we had before, both the Richards brothers, the great paper men, you know, who started the Edgerly Works in Prince George's County, just after the war began. After dinner, Sisson and they met on the piazza. Queerly enough, they had never seen each other before, though they had used reams of Richards' paper in correspondence with each other, and the treasury had used tons of it in the printing of bonds and bank-bills. Of course we all fell to talking of old times,—old they seem now, though it is not a year ago. "Richards," said Sisson at last, "what became of that last order of ours for water-lined, pure linen government calendered paper of sureté? We never got it, and I never knew why."

"Did you think Kilpatrick got it?" said Richards, rather gruffly.[Pg 1383]

"None of your chaff, Richards. Just tell where the paper went, for in the loss of that lot of paper, as it proved, the bottom dropped out of the Treasury tub. On that paper was to have been printed our new issue of ten per cent., convertible, you know, and secured on that up-country cotton, which Kirby Smith had above the Big Raft. I had the printers ready for near a month waiting for that paper. The plates were really very handsome. I'll show you a proof when we go up stairs. Wholly new they were, made by some Frenchman we got, who had worked for the Bank of France. I was so anxious to have the thing well done, that I waited three weeks for that paper, and, by Jove, I waited just too long. We never got one of the bonds off, and that was why we had no money in March."

Richards threw his cigar away. I will not say he swore between his teeth, but he twirled his chair round, brought it down on all fours, both his elbows on his knees and his chin in both hands.

"Mr. Sisson," said he, "if the Confederacy had lived, I would have died before I ever told what became of that order of yours. But now I have no secrets, I believe, and I care for nothing. I do not know now how it happened. We knew it was an extra nice job. And we had it on an elegant little new French Fourdrinier, which cost us more than we shall ever pay. The pretty thing ran like oil the day before. That day, I thought all the devils were in it. The more power we put on the more the rollers screamed; and the less we put on, the more sulkily the jade stopped. I tried it myself every way; back current, I tried; forward current; high feed; low feed; I tried it on old stock, I tried it on new; and, Mr. Sisson, I would have made better paper in a coffee-mill! We drained off every drop of water. We washed the tubs free from size. Then my[Pg 1384] brother, there, worked all night with the machinists, taking down the frame and the rollers. You would not believe it, sir, but that little bit of wire,"—and he took out of his pocket a piece of this hateful steel, which poor I knew so well by this time,—"that little bit of wire had passed in from some hoop-skirt, passed the pickers, passed the screens, through all the troughs, up and down through what we call the lacerators, and had got itself wrought in, where, if you know a Fourdrinier machine, you may have noticed a brass ring riveted to the cross-bar, and there this cursed little knife—for you see it was a knife by that time—had been cutting to pieces the endless wire web every time the machine was started. You lost your bonds, Mr. Sisson, because some Yankee woman cheated one of my rag-men."

On that story I came up stairs. Poor Aunt Eunice! She was the reason I got no salary on the 1st of April. I thought I would warn other women by writing down the story.

That fatal present of mine, in those harmless hourglass parcels, was the ruin of the Confederate navy, army, ordinance, and treasury; and it led to the capture of the poor President, too.

But, Heaven be praised, no one shall say that my office did not do its duty![Pg 1385]

THE LOST INVENTOR[4]

BY WALLACE IRWIN

OMAR IN THE KLONDYKE

BY HOWARD V. SUTHERLAND

THE HAPPY LAND[5]

BY FRANK ROE BATCHELDER

ASSAULT AND BATTERY

BY JOSEPH G. BALDWIN

A trial came off, not precisely in our bailiwick, but in the neighborhood, of great comic interest. It was really a case of a good deal of aggravation, and the defendants, fearing the result, employed four of the ablest lawyers practicing at the M. bar to defend them. The offense charged was only assault and battery; but the evidence showed a conspiracy to inflict great violence on the person of the prosecutor, who had done nothing to provoke it, and that the attempt to effect it was followed by severe injury to him. The prosecutor was an original. He had been an old-field school-master, and was as conceited and pedantic a fellow as could be found in a summer's day, even in that profession. It was thought the policy of the defense to make as light of the case as possible, and to cast as much ridicule on the affair as they could. J.E. and W.M. led the defense, and, although the talents of the former were rather adapted to grave discussion than pleasantry, he agreed to doff his heavy armor for the lighter weapons of wit and ridicule. M. was in his element. He was at all times and on all occasions at home when fun was to be raised: the difficulty with him was rather to restrain than to create mirth and laughter. The case was called and put to the jury. The witness, one Burwell Shines, was called for the prosecution. A broad grin was upon the faces of the counsel for the defense as he came forward. It was increased when the clerk said,[Pg 1392] "Burrell Shines, come to the book;" and the witness, with deliberate emphasis, remarked, "My Christian name is not Burrell, but Burwell, though I am vulgarly denominated by the former epithet." "Well," said the clerk, "Bur-well Shines, come to the book, and be sworn." He was sworn, and directed to take the stand. He was a picture!

He was dressed with care. His toilet was elaborate and befitting the magnitude and dignity of the occasion, the part he was to fill, and the high presence into which he had come. He was evidently favorably impressed with his own personal pulchritude; yet with an air of modest deprecation, as if he said by his manner, "After all, what is beauty, that man should be proud of it; and what are fine clothes, that the wearers should put themselves above the unfortunate mortals who have them not?"

He advanced with deliberate gravity to the stand. There he stood, his large bell-crowned hat, with nankeen-colored nap an inch long, in his hand; which hat he carefully handed over the bar to the clerk to hold until he should get through his testimony. He wore a blue single-breasted coat with new brass buttons, a vest of bluish calico, nankeen pants that struggled to make both ends meet, but failed, by a few inches, in the legs, yet made up for it by fitting a little better than the skin everywhere else. His head stood upon a shirt collar that held it up by the ears, and a cravat, something smaller than a table-cloth, bandaged his throat; his face was narrow, long, and grave, with an indescribable air of ponderous wisdom, which, as Fox said of Thurlow, "proved him necessarily a hypocrite; as it was impossible for any man to be as wise as he looked." Gravity and decorum marked every lineament of his countenance and every line of his body. All the wit of Hudibras could not have moved a muscle[Pg 1393] of his face. His conscience would have smitten him for a laugh almost as soon as for an oath. His hair was roached up, and stood as erect and upright as his body; and his voice was slow, deep, in "linked sweetness long drawn out," and modulated according to the camp-meeting standard of elocution. Three such men at a country frolic would have turned an old Virginia reel into a dead march. He was one of Carlyle's earnest men. Cromwell would have made him ensign of the Ironsides, and ex-officio chaplain at first sight. He took out his pocket-handkerchief, slowly unfolded it from the shape in which it came from the washerwoman's, and awaited the interrogation. As he waited, he spat on the floor, and nicely wiped it out with his foot. The solicitor told him to tell about the difficulty in hand. He gazed around on the court, then on the bar, then on the jury, then on the crowd, addressing each respectively as he turned: "May it please your honor, gentlemen of the bar, gentlemen of the jury, audience: Before proceeding to give my testimonial observations, I must premise that I am a member of the Methodist Episcopal, otherwise called Wesleyan, persuasion of Christian individuals. One bright Sabbath morning in May, the 15th day of the month, the past year, while the birds were singing their matutinal songs from the trees, I sallied forth from the dormitory of my seminary to enjoy the reflections so well suited to that auspicious occasion. I had not proceeded far before my ears were accosted with certain Bacchanalian sounds of revelry, which proceeded from one of those haunts of vicious depravity located at the cross-roads, near the place of my boyhood, and fashionably denominated a doggery. No sooner had I passed beyond the precincts of this diabolical rendezvous of rioting debauchees, than I heard behind me the sounds of approaching footsteps, as if in pur[Pg 1394]suit. Having heard previously sundry menaces, which had been made by these preposterous and incarnadine individuals of hell, now on trial in prospect of condign punishment, fulminated against the longer continuance of my corporeal salubrity, for no better reason than that I reprobated their criminal orgies, and not wishing my reflections to be disturbed, I hurried my steps with a gradual accelerated motion. Hearing, however, their continued advance, and the repeated shoutings, articulating the murderous accents, 'Kill him! Kill Shadbelly, with his praying clothes on!' (which was a profane designation of myself and my religious profession), and casting my head over my left shoulder in a manner somehow reluctantly, thus, (throwing his head to one side), and perceiving their near approximation, I augmented my speed into what might be denominated a gentle slope, and subsequently augmented the same into a species of dog-trot. But all would not do. Gentlemen, the destroyer came. As I reached the fence, and was about propelling my body over the same, felicitating myself on my prospect of escape from my remorseless pursuers, they arrived, and James William Jones, called by nickname, Buck Jones, that red-headed character now at the bar of this honorable court, seized a fence rail, grasped it in both hands, and, standing on tip-toe, hurled the same, with mighty emphasis, against my cerebellum, which blow felled me to the earth. Straightway, like ignoble curs upon a disabled lion, these bandit ruffians and incarnadine assassins leaped upon me, some pelting, some bruising, some gouging,—'everything by turns, and nothing long,' as the poet hath it; and one of them,—which one unknown to me, having no eyes behind,—inflicted with his teeth a grievous wound upon my person; where, I need not specify. At length, when thus prostrate on the ground, one of those bright[Pg 1395] ideas, common to minds of men of genius, struck me. I forthwith sprang to my feet, drew forth my cutto, circulated the same with much vivacity among their several and respective corporeal systems, and every time I circulated the same I felt their iron grasp relax. As cowardly recreants, even to their own guilty friendships, two of these miscreants, though but slightly perforated by my cutto, fled, leaving the other two, whom I had disabled by the vigor and energy of my incisions, prostrate and in my power. These lustily called for quarter, shouting out 'Enough!' or, in their barbarous dialect, being as corrupt in language as in morals, 'Nuff!' which quarter I magnanimously extended them, as unworthy of my farther vengeance, and fit only as subject of penal infliction at the hands of the offended laws of their country, to which laws I do now consign them, hoping such mercy for them as their crimes will permit; which, in my judgment (having read the code) is not much. This is my statement on oath, fully and truly, nothing extenuating and naught setting down in malice; and if I have omitted anything, in form or substance, I stand ready to supply the omission; and if I have stated anything amiss, I will cheerfully correct the same, limiting the averment, with appropriate modifications, provisions, and restrictions. The learned counsel may now proceed more particularly to interrogate me of and respecting the premises."

After this oration, Burwell wiped the perspiration from his brow, and the counsel for the state took him. Few questions were asked him, however, by that official, he confining himself to a recapitulation in simple terms, of what the witness had declared, and procuring Burwell's assent to his translation. Long and searching was the cross-examination by the defendant's counsel; but it elic[Pg 1396]ited nothing favorable to the defense, and nothing shaking, but much to confirm, Burwell's statement.

After some other evidence, the examination closed, and the argument to the jury commenced. The solicitor very briefly adverted to the leading facts, deprecated any attempt to turn the case into ridicule, admitted that the witness was a man of eccentricity and pedantry, but harmless and inoffensive; a man, evidently, of conscientiousness and respectability; that he had shown himself to be a peaceable man, but when occasion demanded, a brave man; that there was a conspiracy to assassinate him upon no cause except an independence, which was honorable to him, and an attempt to execute the purpose, in pursuance of previous threats, and severe injury by several confederates on a single person, and this on the Sabbath, and when he was seeking to avoid them.

W.M. rose to reply. All Screamersville turned out to hear him. William was a great favorite,—the most popular speaker in the country,—had the versatility of a mocking-bird, an aptitude for burlesque that would have given him celebrity as a dramatist, and a power of acting that would have made his fortune on the boards of a theater. A rich treat was expected, but it didn't come. The witness had taken all the wind out of William's sails. He had rendered burlesque impossible. The thing as acted was more ludicrous than it could be as described. The crowd had laughed themselves hoarse already; and even M.'s comic powers seemed, and were felt by himself, to be humble imitations of a greater master. For once in his life M. dragged his subject heavily along. The matter began to grow serious,—fun failed to come when M. called it up. M. closed between a lame argument, a timid deprecation, and some only tolerable humor. He was followed by E., in a discursive, argumentative, sarcastic,[Pg 1397] drag-net sort of speech, which did all that could be done for the defense. The solicitor briefly closed, seriously and confidently confining himself to a repetition of the matters first insisted, and answering some of the points of the counsel.

It was an ominous fact that a juror, before the jury retired, under leave of the court, recalled a witness for the purpose of putting a question to him: the question was how much the defendants were worth; the answer was, about two thousand dollars.

The jury shortly after returned into the court with a verdict which "sized their pile."[Pg 1398]

THE PRAYER OF CYRUS BROWN

BY SAM WALTER FOSS

FOOTNOTES:

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