Chapter V (5)

Johnnie K---- is a charming little cherub of four bright Springs. One day he poured the ink into the globe where the gold-fish were, submerging them instantaneously in total eclipse; then he put the Bible in the fire, threw a bronze paper-weight through the looking-glass, broke four eggs in his sister’s new hat, and wound up his artless sport by throwing the cat down the cistern. His mother, discovering all this mischief, suspected who was the author, and sought her son.

“Johnnie,” she said, sadly, “Why did you act so naughty?”

“I didn’t,” he persisted. “Deed, muzzy, it was ze cat!”

Sweet child! Does it need the prescience of a prophet to see that he will some day make an excellent witness in a great scandal case?

Then there is another sweet little tid-toddler out on Seventh Street. The other day one of his parents, the female one, put him to sleep and laid him in his little crib, and then she ran over the street to ask Mrs. Muldoon how she washed flannels, and got to talking about the last funeral, and the mission circle, and the new preacher, and forgot all about the baby, and when she went home there that dear little blessed was, flat on his back, with his little crib lying on top of him, and he yelling like a scalded pig.

Ah, the wild, weird, ventures and dreams of child life. Try it, gray-haired man; see if you can fall out of bed and flop your bedstead, slats, springs, mattress and all, on top of you as you land on the floor. You can not do it, but the tid-toddler of three sweet Summers--ah, well, who shall say how their untried instinct shames the lore and knowledge of our elder years.

SETTLING UNDER DIFFICULTIES.

Strangers visiting the beautiful city of Burlington have not failed to notice that one of the handsomest young men they meet is very bald, and they fall into the usual error of attributing this premature baldness to dissipation. But such is not the case. This young man, one of the most exemplary Bible-class scholars in the city, went to a Baptist sociable out on West Hill one night about two years ago. He escorted three charming girls, with angelic countenances and human appetites, out to the refreshment table, let them eat all they wanted, and then found he had left his pocket-book at home, and a deaf man that he had never seen before at the cashier’s desk. The young man, with his face aflame, bent down and said softly,

“I am ashamed to say I have no change with----”

“Hey?” shouted the cashier.

“I regret to say,” the young man repeated on a little louder key, “that I have unfortunately come away without any change to----”

“Change two?” chirped the old man, “Oh, yes, I can change five if you want it.”

“No,” the young man explained in a terrible, penetrating whisper, for half a dozen people were crowding up behind him, impatient to pay their bills and get away, “I don’t want any change, because----”

“Oh, don’t want no change?” the deaf man cried, gleefully. “’Bleeged to ye, ’bleeged to ye. ’Taint often we get such generous donations. Pass over your bill.”

“No, no,” the young man explained, “I have no funds----”

“Oh, yes, plenty of fun,” the deaf man replied, growing tired of the conversation and noticing the long line of people waiting with money in their hands, “but I haven’t got time to talk about it now. Settle and move on.”

“But,” the young man gasped out, “I have no money----”

“Go Monday?” queried the deaf cashier. “I don’t care when you go; you must pay and let these other people come up.”

“I have no money!” the mortified young man shouted, ready to sink into the earth, while the people all around him, and especially the three girls he had treated, were giggling and chuckling audibly.

“Owe money?” the cashier said, “of course you do; $2.75.”

“I can’t pay!” the youth screamed, and by turning his pocket inside out and yelling his poverty to the heavens, he finally made the deaf man understand. And then he had to shriek his full name three times, while his ears fairly rang with the half-stifled laughter that was breaking out all around him; and he had to scream out where he worked, and roar when he would pay, and he couldn’t get the deaf man to understand him until some of the church members came up to see what the uproar was, and recognizing their young friend, made it all right with the cashier. And the young man went out into the night and clubbed himself, and shred his locks away until he was bald as an egg.

HAWK-EYETEMS.

SOMEBODY told Billinger that stamps were not required on notes, and Billinger, overjoyed, asked the crowd to drink, and said he pitied old Gunnybags who had been trying for six months to get the stamps on a note he holds against Billinger. Billinger says he knew he would get the law on the old gouge if he held on long enough.

* * * * *

“PULL out, Bill!” shrieked an engineer’s son to one of his playmates, a brakeman’s boy, who was in imminent danger of getting smashed by his mother, who was coming after him, “Git on the main line and give her steam! Here comes the switch engine!” But before the juvenile could get in motion, she had him by the ear, and he was laid up with a hot box.

* * * * *

A NORTH HILL man refused to give his boy thirty-five cents to go to the minstrels, because the entertainment was demoralizing and vulgar in its nature. He then bought a quarter’s worth of chewing tobacco, went home and read the _Weekly Moral Guide and Guardian_, and spit all over the front of the stove, and made the parlor smell so much like a stale bar-room that the baby had three whisky fits before ten o’clock.

* * * * *

A YOUNG editor out in Floyd County, gushing over his first, asks, “Did you ever watch a dear little baby waking from its morning nap?” N-not exactly; but we have watched a dear little baby’s fond pa gliding up and down the fireless room, trying to induce the dear little baby to take a morning nap, at 2:15 A. M.--pressing offers but no takers--which was about as much fun as it can be to see the baby wake.

* * * * *

A MAN out on Summer Street has eight daughters, and when they cleaned house last Spring, the woman raked 9,724 quids of chewing gum down from the window casings, chair backs, door panels and sofa backs, the accumulation of the past Winter. And this does not include the wads which the man, at various times sat down on and carried away on the tails of his coat, for which no accurate returns have been made.

* * * * *

OLD Middlerib came home one night and ordered a light lunch before going to bed. “Just a mouthful of tea and a bit of bread,” he explained. “Do you want just plain bread?” asked Mrs. M., with reference to the presence or absence of butter. And the old reprobate said he would take one piece plain, and the other with a looped overskirt, shirred down the gores with the same, and held in place with knife pleatings of grape jelly. He got the heel of the loaf.

* * * * *

EVERYBODY thought it was a match, and so did he, and so did she. One evening at a croquet party she hit her pet corn a whack with the mallet that sounded like a torpedo, and he--he laughed. “We meet as strangers,” she wrote on her cuff and showed it to him. “Think of me as no more,” he whispered huskily, and when the game was ended he rushed down to the Mississippi[B] and drowned[C].

[B] Saloon.
[C] Sorrow.

* * * * *

“I WOULDN’T be such a Christian as you are, John,” said his wife, as she stood in the doorway, dressed for church. “You could go with me very well, if you wanted to.” “How can I?” he half sobbed. “There’s the wood to be split, and the coal to be shoveled over to the other side of the cellar, the baby to be dressed, and no dishes washed for dinner yet.” “Ah, I didn’t think of that,” she murmured thoughtfully, and, giving her new cloak a fresh hitch aft, sailed out alone.

* * * * *

ONE night last Summer a tired, discouraged man out on North Hill went home and flung himself down on a lounge, and said “he wished he were dead, dead, dead.” In two hours he was writhing in a premature and unseasonable attack of cholera morbus, and howled, and prayed, and sweat, and had four doctors in the house, and drank a quart of medicine, and had mustard plasters smeared all over him, and wept, and said he wasn’t half tended to, and he believed they would like to see him die.

* * * * *

“ARE the children safe?” asks the _Christian Union_. Quite safe, we assure you. They are up in the garret, playing hotel fire. Jimmie is the clerk, and is trying to slide down the water pipe to the ground, Willie is a guest, hanging to the window sill and waiting for the flames to reach his hands before he tries to drop to the shed roof, two stories below, and Tom is a heroic fireman, and has tied his fishing line around the baby’s body, and is letting it down to the ground. Oh, yes, the children are all right: just finish your call and don’t fret about the children.

* * * * *

“RENTS,” said Mr. Middlerib, with a sigh of not unmixed satisfaction, “are coming down. Yesterday morning I tore the back of my coat on the woodshed door, last night I snagged the foundation of my trousers on a nail in a store box, and this morning I fell down on the frozen sidewalk and split the knee of the same trousers clear across. Rents are certainly getting lower.” “Yes,” responded Mrs. Middlerib, looking across toward the busy figure at the sewing-machine, “and seamstresses are getting hired.” Mr. Middlerib looked up at his quiet spouse in vague astonishment, as if for explanation, but she looked sublimely unconscious, and the good man went off down town with his napkin tucked under his chin, wondering all the way to the office if she meant it or if it was only his interpretation.

* * * * *

“A MERCIFUL man,” tenderly remarked a Ninth Street man one bitter cold January morning, “is merciful to his beast,” and he called the dog in out of the snow, gave him his breakfast in a soup plate, and laid a piece of carpet down behind the kitchen stove for him to snooze on. Then the man went down town, and the neighbors watched his wife shovel snow-paths to the woodshed, cistern, stable, and front gate, and then do an hour’s work cleaning off the sidewalk.

* * * * *

WHO does not love a faithful, honest dog, man’s faithful friend? And yet who is there, stretching out in the shade for a quiet afternoon nap, who has had man’s faithful friend come panting up, and, in an excess of honest affection, lay a great broad, hot tongue over one’s cheek, from chin to eyebrow, that does not get up and seize man’s faithful friend by the tail and one ear and try to throw him across a prairie fifteen miles wide?

* * * * *

THE New York _Herald_ says: “Bake your ripe pear in a tart, and eat it with brandy and cream.” We’ll do it. Here, Alvaretto, bake us that ripe pear in a tart and dress it with brandy and cream. What! the pear eaten? Well then, the tart crust and the trimmings. The tart gone! Is it possible? Then the brandy and cream. Amazement! no cream? Ah, well then, we must not neglect good advice. Bring what is left of the recipe.

* * * * *

A MONKEY that can say “papa” and “mamma” and “Brazil” is going to the Paris exposition. America can send a donkey that can say, “Haw--yaas, dweadful baw; somebody wing faw the pwopwietah.”

* * * * *

THEY have just found the skin of another Dane nailed to the oaken door of an old, old church in England. The skin isn’t entire, only scraps of it remaining under the broad flat heads of the nails. It was a pleasant way the Danes had of destroying the beauty of their criminals--they skinned them and then nailed the skin to a church door. History does not tell us how the unfortunate victim employed himself during the operation, but it is quite likely that, having nothing else to do, he was into some deviltry.

* * * * *

OLD Mr. Troph went into the parlor the other night at the witching hour of 11.45 and found the room unlighted and his daughter and a dear friend, one of the dual form of garmenture variety, occupying the tete-a-tete in the corner. “Evangeline,” the old man said sternly, “this is scandalous.” “Yes, papa,” she answered sweetly, “it is candleless because times are so hard and lights cost so much that Ferdinand and I said we would try and get along with the starlight.” And the old gentleman turned about in speechless amazement and tried to walk out of the room through a panel in the wall paper.

* * * * *

A WOMAN out on North Hill, being counted out the other morning, after a debate on the question, “Who shall arise and build the fire?” got up and split her husband’s wooden leg into kindling wood, and broiled his steak with it. It made him so mad that he got hold of her false teeth and bit the dog with them. She cried until she had a fit of hysterics, and then flipped out his glass eye and climbed upon the bed post and waxed the glaring eye to the ceiling with a quid of chewing gum. Then he took her wisp of false hair and tied it to a stick, and began whitewashing the kitchen with it. Then she started off to obtain a divorce, but Judge Newman decided that he couldn’t grant a divorce unless there were two parties to the suit, and there was hardly enough left of them to make one.

* * * * *

“YOU don’t look at all well,” a venerable gobbler out in a North Hill poultry yard remarked to a melancholy-looking young rooster, a short time before Thanksgiving day. “No,” was the reply, “I have reason to look solemn: I expect to die necks tweak.” The gobbler smiled grimly and pondered over the uncertainty of poultric life as he slowly swallowed a two-inch bolt head.

* * * * *

MRS. MIDDLERIB paused to take a final survey of the table before she called the ladies out to tea. She started as her eyes fell upon the plate of lemon tarts. There were five where there had been nine. She sought her only son and put him in the witness box. He objected to her putting her own construction upon his answers, and was subjected to the usual punishment for contumaciousness. And the next “composition day” at school, Master Middlerib amazed his teacher by reading, as the title of his essay, “The Lost Tarts, and why They can Never be Recovered.”

* * * * *

SWEET, gushing, artless girl! She came home just before the Christmas holidays. She went away from Burlington one September; went to England first; spent the Winter in Italy; sauntered through Germany in the Spring, came back to America and trifled away the Summer at Saratoga, Long Branch and the White Mountains; previous to this trip she had been away to school five years, and when she jumped out of the palace car into her father’s arms, she said, impulsively, “Oh, Paw, Paw, deah, deah Paw, thay’s no place like home!” And Paw’s face was a study as he replied, “Well, no; no; reckon not; must be quite a novelty to ye.”

* * * * *

THE worst thing we have seen about Oliver Wendell Holmes, and the only stain on an otherwise irreproachable character, is that he is the inventor of that parlor aggravation known as the hand stereoscope; a vexatious contrivance for which the pictures are always too large to be crammed into the springs or too small to stay in them, of which the slide is always shoved off the end of the stick in the vain efforts of the observer to find a focus, and of which the glasses always make you see the picture so double that it gives you the headache and finally compels you to peep over the top in order to gain the information necessary to make some intelligent remark about the jumble you have been staring at.

* * * * *

A YOUNG man out on North Hill bought a parrot some months ago, and in anticipation of the fact that he was going to be married and go to the Centennial, he secretly taught the parrot to say, “Welcome, thrice welcome home,” every time anybody opened the front door, thinking what a delightful surprise it would be to his young wife to be thus cheerfully welcomed home on their return. But while they were on their tour, the nervous woman who was left in charge of the house taught the parrot a new remark, as a protection against burglars; and when the young people came home on the night train and let themselves in at the hall door with a latch key, they were shocked and appalled by a terrific shout of “Thieves! thieves! Police! police! Here Bull! here Bull! Scatter, ye son of a thief, or I’ll tear your heart out!” Next day the parrot died, and the young wife now says she wouldn’t stay alone in that house, not for a divorce.

* * * * *

A BURLINGTON naturalist last Sunday, while investigating the causes and effects of the poison of a wasp sting, nobly determined to make of himself a martyr to science, and accordingly handed his thumb to an impatient insect he had caged in a bottle. The wasp entered into the martyr business with a great deal of spirit, and backed up to the thumb with an abruptness which took the scientist by surprise. He was so deeply absorbed in the study of remedies that he forgot to make any notes of the other points in connection with stings, but his wife wrote a paragraph in his note-book, for the benefit of science, to the effect that the primary effect of a wasp sting is abrupt, blasphemous and terrific profanity, followed by an intense desire, fairly amounting to a mania, for ammonia, camphor and raw brandy.

* * * * *

ONE day, just after King Solomon had written a column of solid nonpareil wise and moral proverbs, he took his eldest son by the elbow, led him down the back stairs of the palace, through the back yard, past the woodshed, out into the alley, backed him up behind Ahithophel’s wood-pile, looked warily around to see that no one was listening, and whispered into the young man’s ear, “My son, a little office in a spread-eagle life insurance company is better than a cart-load of preferred stock in the Ophir mines.” And then the monarch threw his head on one side, drew in his chin, shut one eye, and gazed at his offspring in silence. Three years afterward, when the Great Hebraic Consolidated Stormy Jordan Life Assurance Company, of which that intelligent young prince was president, went into bankruptcy, the young man was able to let his father, who was a little short at the time, have 275,000 shekels for ninety days, on his simple note of hand.

* * * * *

THEY were very pretty, and there was apparently five or six years difference in their ages. As the train pulled up at Bussey, the younger girl blushed, flattened her nose nervously against the window, and drew back in joyous smiles as a young man came dashing into the car, shook hands tenderly and cordially, insisted on carrying her valise, magazine, little paper bundle, and would probably have carried herself had she permitted him. The passengers smiled as she left the car, and the murmur went rippling through the coach, “They’re engaged.” The other girl sat looking nervously out of the window, and once or twice gathered her parcels together as though she would leave the car, yet seemed to be expecting some one. At last he came. He bulged in at the door like a house on fire, looked along the seats until his manly gaze fell on her upturned, expectant face, roared, “Come on! I’ve been waiting for you on the platform for fifteen minutes!” grabbed her basket, and strode out of the car, while she followed with a little valise, a band-box, a paper bag full of lunch, a bird-cage, a glass jar of jelly, and an extra shawl. And a crusty-looking old bachelor, in the farther end of the car, croaked out, in unison with the indignant looks of the passengers, “They’re married!”

* * * * *

MR. and Mrs. Bilderback were walking slowly home from church one Sunday, when they met a young lady of singular beauty and sweetness of countenance, who was quite lame. And Mrs. Bilderback turning to her husband, said, “Did you ever notice what a sweet, uncomplaining look of resignation rests like a halo on the faces of young girls who are so sadly afflicted as the lady who just passed us?” And old Bilderback said that indeed he had, and he begged his wife to observe him very closely, and notice what a sweet, uncomplaining expression of peaceful and holy resignation spread itself over his face, like a halo, or like a lump of butter on a hot buckwheat cake, at such times as his corns tried him unusually bad. And she only remarked casually that when they got home she would hang a halo around his irreverent head that would make what little hair there was left on it think the millennium was a million years farther away than ever.

* * * * *

“THEY had a rather odd race out at the old Acme ball grounds yesterday,” Trotters remarked to Ponsonby when they met yesterday morning. “Jones rode his little calico pony around the block, and Brown rolled an empty flour barrel the same distance, even start, for $10.” “Jones beat him, of course?” said Ponsonby. “Brown was a fool to make such a match.” “Don’t be too sure,” rejoined Trotters, “when they reached the outcome, the barrel head; blowed if it didn’t.” Ponsonby stared, then slowly smiled, giggled, and finally guffawed. “Good enough,” he said. “I’ll get that off to Mrs. Ponsonby.” So when he went home he told her all about it. “Well,” said she, “that’s just about as much sense as I supposed that precious Brown of yours has. I’m glad he lost his money.” “Go slow,” yelled the delighted Ponsonby, who doesn’t often have a chance to sell his wife, “go slow! By George, Samantha, Brown beat!” And Mrs. Ponsonby stared and said he must think she was as big a fool as Brown. “No,” said he, hastily correcting himself, “no, that wasn’t just the way of it, the barrel beat, that’s it! The barrel beat; Brown led, did, for a fact, by Jove.” And Mrs. Ponsonby scornfully told him to go out to the woodshed and see if he could find any sticks that would go into the kitchen stove--she couldn’t. And Ponsonby confidentially told the gentleman who saws his wood an inch and a half too long for every stove in the house that you might as well tell a joke to a sawbuck as to his wife, for she hadn’t as much conception of genuine humor as a cow.

* * * * *

ONE bright May morning, when the building season was at its busiest, a careless mason dropped a half brick from the second story of a building out on Jefferson Street, on which he was at work. Leaning over the wall and glancing downward, he discovered a respectable citizen with his silk hat scrunched over his eyes and ears, rising from a recumbent posture. The mason, in tones of some apprehension, asked: “Did that brick hit any one down there?” The citizen, with great difficulty extricating himself from the glove-fitting extinguisher, replied, with considerable wrath: “Yes, sir, it did; it hit me.” “That’s right,” exclaimed the mason, in tones of undisguised admiration. “Noble man! I would rather have wasted a thousand bricks than had you tell me a lie about it.”

* * * * *

THE papers in this country are quite generally publishing the following _mot_ of Talleyrand’s, which is read with the greatest enjoyment by all classes of newspaper readers:

It is said that the notorious M. De Manbreuil, whose name of Marquis
d’Orvault came so scandalously before the public a few years past,
proposed to have Napoleon assassinated, and that the Abbe de Prade
was in favor of the scheme, and discussed its execution with
Talleyrand, and that the following words passed:

“Combien vous faut-il?”

“Dix millions.”

“Dix millions?” said Talleyrand, “mais ce n’est rein pour debarrasser
la France d’un el fileau.”

This is pretty good, but it reminds us of a much better one, though it may be somewhat old, which was related to us by Rev. Jasper C. Romilly, formerly of this city, about himself. Mr. Romilly, whose distinguishing personal characteristic was an immense black beard, was for some years a missionary at Ugobogo, in Farther India, and on one occasion he dined with the Bugaboo of that province. When the wine and walnuts were brought in the Bugaboo said:

“Marcharikai hoi-to-po ke-tee nomkidom?”

“Jabbero pompety doodle de wonk klonk kobberee jam,” replied Mr. Romilly.

“Yowk?” exclaimed the potentate, “chickero boobery hong dong choi-ke-ree yang ste’ boi.”

This was, indeed, too good to keep.

* * * * *

WOMAN is a natural traveler. It is a study to see her start off on a trip by herself. She comes down to the depot in an express wagon three hours before train time. She insists on sitting on her trunk, out on the platform, to keep it from being stolen. She picks up her reticule, fan, parasol, lunch basket, small pot with a house plant in it, shawl, paper bag of candy, bouquet (she never travels without one), small tumbler and extra veil, and chases hysterically after every switch engine that goes by, under the impression that it is her train. Her voice trembles as she presents herself at the restaurant and tries to buy a ticket, and she knocks with the handle of her parasol on the door of the old disused tool-house in vain hopes that the baggage man will come out and check her trunk. She asks every body in the depot and on the platform when her train will start, and where it will stand, and, looking straight at the great clock, asks: “What time is it now?” She sees, with terror, the baggage man shy her trunk into a car where two men are smoking, instead of locking it up by itself in a large strong, brown car with “Bad order, shops,” chalked on the side, which she has long ago determined to be the baggage car as the only safe one in sight. Although the first at the depot, she is the last to get her ticket; and once on the cars, she sits, to the end of her journey, in an agony of apprehension that she has got on the wrong train and will be landed at some strange station, put in a close carriage, drugged, and murdered, and to every last male passenger who walks down the aisle she stands up and presents her ticket, which she invariably carries in her hand. She finally recognizes her waiting friends on the platform, leaves the car in a burst of gratitude, and the train is ten miles away before she remembers that her reticule, fan, parasol, lunch basket, verbena, shawl, candy, tumbler, veil and bouquet, are on the car seat where she left them, or at the depot in Peoria, for the life of her she can’t tell which.

* * * * *

HOW often a little careless action, a thoughtless word, a restless gesture, brings a flood of thoughts surging into the soul, that almost tear away the veil of mystery that hangs between to-day and to-morrow, and give us vague and hasty glimpses into the dark uncertain future. When you see a man come out of a drug store, for instance, with a “prescription carefully compounded,” in his hand, and dash away at break-neck speed, and then see the pharmacist come to the door carrying an uncorked bottle, and smell at it earnestly with one nostril, gaze anxiously down the street after the man, smell at it long and intensely with the other nostril, stare wildly up the street after the man, and then sniff at it once or twice with both nostrils, read the prescription over, and retire into the medicine shop with a gloomy brow and sad shakes of the head, how many things you begin to think about then, as it might be.

* * * * *

“MY son,” said a pious father out on South Hill to his hopeful son, “you did not saw any wood for the kitchen stove yesterday, as I told you to, you left the back gate open and let the cow get out, you cut off eighteen feet from the clothes-line to make a lasso, you stoned Mr. Robinson’s pet dog and lamed it, you put a hard-shell turtle in the hired girl’s bed, you tied a strange dog to Mr. Jacobson’s door-bell, you painted red and green stripes on the legs of old Mrs. Polaby’s white pony, and hung your sister’s bustle out in the front window. Now, what am I--what can I do to you for such conduct?” “Are all the counties heard from?” asked the candidate. The father replied sternly, “No trifling, sir; no, I have yet several reports to receive from others of the neighbors.” “Then,” replied the boy, “you will not be justified in proceeding to extreme measures until the official count is in.” Shortly afterward the election was thrown into the house, and before half the votes were canvassed, it was evident, from the peculiar intonation of the applause, that the boy was badly beaten.

* * * * *

PASSING by one of the city schools one day we listened to the scholars singing, “Oh how I love my teacher dear.” There was one boy, with a voice like a tornado, who was so enthusiastic that he emphasized every other word and roared, “Oh _how_ I _love_ my _teach_-er _dear_,” with a vim that left no possible doubt of his affection. Ten minutes afterward that boy had been stood up on the floor for putting shoemaker’s wax on his teacher’s chair, got three demerit marks for drawing a picture of her with red chalk on the back of an atlas, been well shaken for putting a bent pin in another boy’s chair, scolded for whistling out loud, sentenced to stay after school for drawing ink mustaches on his face and blacking the end of another boy’s nose, and soundly whipped for slapping three hundred and thirty-nine spit balls up against the ceiling, and throwing one big one into a girl’s ear. You can’t believe half a boy says when he sings.

* * * * *

“WHO dem, Cassius?” a visiting freedman from Keokuk asked a friend the other day, as a Masonic lodge, in funeral procession, passed by.

“Dey’s de Free and Expected Masons.”

“’Mazin’ what?”

“Why, mason nuffin, jest on’y Masons.”

“Sho! How long dey bin free?”

“Oh, gory, long time. Spects ever since de mancipation proclamation, anyhow. Some on ’em was free before den.”

“Dat so? Went off to Canada, mos’ likely?”

“Spect so.”

“Who’s done expectin’ of ’em?”

“Nobody; jest expectin’ demselves. Dey’s on’y jest Free and Expected Masons, dat’s all.”

“Sho! Well, I’d jest like to know what dar is ’mazin’ about ’em an’ I’d done be satisfied.”

* * * * *

OH, the artless prattle of an innocent childhood! How the sweet music of their hearts and voices calms the wild yearnings of the sorrow-crowned years of maturity. At a happy home in Burlington the other evening, where the family was gathered around the tea-table entertaining unexpected guests, the fond mother said to the youngest darling, “Weedie, darling; be careful; you mustn’t spill the berries on the table-cloth.” “’Taint a table-cloth,” promptly responded darling, “it’s a sheet.” And late at night, when the company had gone away, and that sweet child was standing with its head nearly where its feet ought to be, catching with its tear-blinded eyes occasional glimpses of a fleeting slipper that fluttered in the air in eccentric gyrations, one could see how early in the stormy years of this brief life, one may begin to suffer for the truth.

* * * * *

WHEN you see a young man sitting in a parlor, with the ugliest six year old boy that ever frightened himself in the mirror clambering over his knees, jerking his white tie out of knot, mussing his white vest, kicking his shins, feeling in all his pockets for nickles, bombarding him from time to time with various bits of light furniture and _bijouterie_, calling him names at the top of his fiendish lungs and yelling incessantly for him to come out in the yard and play, while the unresisting victim smiles all the time like the cover of a comic almanac, you may safely bet--although there isn’t a sign of a girl apparent in a radius of 10,000 miles--you can bet your bottom dollar that howling boy has a sister who is primping in a room not twenty feet away, and that the young man doesn’t come there just for the fun of playing with her brother.

* * * * *

IT was at the sociable. Young Mr. Sophthed, who reads poetry oh, _so_ divinely, and is oh, _so_ nice, stepped on her dress as she was hurrying across the room. K-r-r-rt! R’p! R’p! how it tore and jerked, and how Mr. Sophthed looked as though he would die. “Oh, dear, no, Mr. Sophthed,” she sweetly said, smiling till she looked like a seraph who had got down here by mistake, “it’s of no consequence, I assure you, it doesn’t make a particle of difference, at all.” Just twenty-five minutes later, her husband, helping her into the street car, mussed her ruffle. “Goodness gracious me!” she snapped out, “go way and let me alone; you’ll tear me to pieces if you keep on.” And she flopped down on the seat so hard that everything rattled, and the frightened driver, ejaculating, “There goes that brake chain again,” crawled under the car with his lantern to see how badly it had given way.

* * * * *

ART has its votaries even amid the untaught children of the wilderness. A few days ago a savage Indian painted his own face, went into an emigrant wagon that was sketched, by himself, out on the prairie after dark, and drew a woman from under the canvas and sculptor.

* * * * *

MRS. J. C. MCWHELTER, who lives out on Ninth Street, worked three weeks building a rookery out of cracked geodes, and threw the whole pile away in fifteen minutes yesterday afternoon, bombarding a neighbor who said her baby’s hair was red enough to heat its catnip tea on.

* * * * *

AN enraptured Burlington lover, hearing his sweetheart sigh dejectedly the other evening, rapturously administered a quartette of kisses and exclaimed, “You’re mine, now, in spite of fate!” “And why?” she asked. “Because,” he said, “four of a kind beats ace high.” But she believes to this day that he played a cold deck on her.

* * * * *

“ALL flesh is grass,” as the reaping machine said when it chawed up the harvest hand.

* * * * *

A MAN may carry a load of guilt concealed in his tortured soul for years, and hide it with a veneering of hollow, heartless, deceitful smiles, but it doesn’t take five minutes for the thoughtless world to observe and understand the one-shouldered gait of a man whose larboard suspender button has parted.

* * * * *

THE other day a public reader, while entertaining an audience with a masterly rendition of an extract from “Macbeth,” dropped his false teeth out, but he went right on with the soliloquy, “Ig gish a daggag ash I see befog me? Cug, leg me glug ghee!” And then the audience got up and howled and threw all the chairs out of the window and sent out for somebody to come in and hold them while they hollered.

* * * * *

A SOUTH HILL man complained to old Dibbs, the other day, that his house was infested with chimney swallows, but old Dibbs says he is ready to bet fifty dollars that the man swallows twice as much as the chimney does.

* * * * *

A YOUNG native poet, who is writing a “song of olden Rome,” asks us to give him a rhyme for Romulus. A dozen, if he wants them:

“If o’er that wall you leap, oh dunce,
The lightning stroke would harm you less”
But Remus laughed and leaped; at once
His head was punched by Romulus.

* * * * *

A FELLOW never appreciates the tender beauty of a sister’s love half so much as when he makes her get out of the big rocking chair, and let him have the morning paper, while she goes off and leans up against the end of the bureau and feeds her starving intellect on the household receipts at the back of Jayne’s family almanac. A brother’s love is like pure gold. It’s dreadfully hard to find, and when you find it, it’s very apt to be pyrites.

* * * * *

“DID you never,” asked a transcendental young lady just three weeks from Vassar, of the West Hill young man, “Did you never feel a vague, unrestful yearning after the beyond? a wild, strange, impulsive longing and reaching out after the unattainable?” And the West Hill man said he often had, last Summer, at such times as he was trying to scratch a square inch full of hives, right between his shoulder blades, and just out of reach of any thing.

* * * * *

A BENEVOLENT clergyman recently helped a profane Burlington inebriate out of the gutter, and gently rebuking him reminded him that the “wages of sin is death.” “I know ’t,” replied the erring one, “but I’ve worked so much over time, and the shop is so far in arrears to me that I’ll never get half that’s comin’ to me any how.” And he went off to work right along on the same old job.

* * * * *

THE tramp has his revenge on society after all. If they refuse his request for a square meal at any house, he lurks around the vicinity with threatening glances until nightfall, when he skulks rapidly away with the cheering, comforting knowledge that while he is snoring all the hours of that long Summer night away under a haystack, every being in that house will sit bolt upright in bed all night, frightened by the wind, terrified by the rustling of the leaves, scared into fits when even the dog barks, and fairly bounced out of bed every time the clock strikes, while a nightmare of burglarious tramps fills every drowsy moment with awakening terrors. No wonder that tramps always look happy and contented.

* * * * *

OLD Mr. Balbriggan is very much pleased with a gentleman whom he has engaged to saw wood. “When he piles the wood,” said old Balbriggan to his friend, “if one stick projects beyond the others, he pounds it in with the ax.” “He’s a slouch,” replied Bifelstone, “you should see my wood sawyer. When he gets the wood all piled he takes off the rough projecting ends with a hand saw.” “He couldn’t pile wood for me,” broke in old Mr. Pilkinghorn, “my sawyer piles the wood carefully, then goes over the ends with a jack plane, sand-papers them down and puts on a coat of varnish before he ever thinks of asking for his pay.” And then they all went in after a big drink before Throckmorton could tell how his wood sawyer silver-plated all the ends of the wood and nailed a handle on every stick to pick it up by. Because, you see, Throckmorton is such a liar, and they all know it.

* * * * *

A WEST HILL minister picked up a frozen wasp on the sidewalk, and with a view to advancing the interests of science, he carried it in the house and held it by the tail while he warmed its ears over a lamp chimney. His object was to see if wasps froze to death, or merely lay dormant during the Winter. He is of the opinion that they merely lie dormant, and the dormantest kind at that, and when they revive, he says, the tail thaws out first, for while this one’s head, right over the lamp, was so stiff and cold it could not wink, its probe worked with such inconceivable rapidity that the minister couldn’t gasp fast enough to keep up with it. He threw the vicious thing down the lamp chimney, and said he didn’t want to have any more truck with a dormant wasp, at which his wife burst into tears and asked how he, a minister of the gospel, could use such language, right before the children, too.

* * * * *

WHEN a man accustoms himself to owning a dog, and turning around at every corner to look up and down street for him, and whistle him out of stairways, or yell at him to stop his fooling with other dogs and come along, or make dashes into a crowd of earnest and excited dogs who are holding a caucus and have each other by the ear, and especially his dog--that man is a slave to a habit that he will never break. It will cling to him, we believe, after he gets to heaven, for most men who love dogs are pretty sure of going to heaven. We once saw an old settler standing at the Barrett House corner, peering up and down street, and stooping down to look under the hacks, and “wondering where he could be,” and whistling and growing impatient, and scolding and calling, “Hyuh, Turk! yuh! yuh! yuh!” until every dog in Burlington was sitting around the Barrett House corner, patiently pounding the snow with his tail and mentally resolving to lay for Turk if he ever came. Presently a young man came along and, greeting the anxious dog hunter as his “Father,” asked what he was waiting there for? The old settler said he had lost Turk somewhere right around there, and couldn’t see hide nor hair of him, and couldn’t imagine where he had gone to. “Turk!” roared his dutiful son, “Turk! Suffering Moses! And him dead eight years ago!” And he hustled the old man away before he could begin to whistle up any more ghosts.

* * * * *

THE balmy breath of Spring is so entwined with the fragrance of new onions that a man has to grip his nose with a spring clothes-pin every time he stoops to pluck a violet.

* * * * *

A GIFTED contributor sends us a poem beginning “Open the doors to the children.” You’d better, if you don’t want all the paint kicked off the panels.

* * * * *

THERE is nothing that tends to destroy popular sympathy for the working classes so much as the habit a bricklayer has of dropping bits of mortar from the top of a five-story wall into the eye of the wondering man who stands under the lofty scaffolding and looks up.

* * * * *

A PORCELAIN-LINED kettle in a berry-stricken neighborhood is the nearest approach to perpetual motion that has yet been realized. Its incessant motion is only rivaled by the slow, steady growth of the sugar bill.

* * * * *

ONE of the discoveries made by the latest arctic explorers is that the length of the polar night is one hundred and forty-two days. What a heavenly place that would be in which to tell a man with a bill to call around day after to-morrow and get his money.

* * * * *

A FASHION journal says “white velvet dresses give a roundness to the figure.” They give an awful lankness to the figures on a hundred dollar bill.

* * * * *

_Multum in parvo_: Iowa tramp, to lady of the house: “Please, missus, won’t you give me something to drink? I’m so hungry I don’t know where I’ll stay to-night.”

* * * * *

AN eminent New York jurist, who has retired from the bench, always shakes hands with his friends by turning around and passing his right hand behind his back. It is supposed the peculiar habit was contracted during his active professional life.

* * * * *

CARDS of invitation in Utah, issued by a young lady and her mother, always present the compliments of “Miss Smith and the Mrs. Smiths.”

* * * * *

WE are told by a Russian traveler that the summit of Mt. Hood is a single sharp peak of lava. White or Balaclava?

* * * * *

A SCIENTIFIC gentleman sends us an elaborate treatise on “the healthiness of lemons.” They may be dreadfully healthy, but they are terribly soured in their dispositions.

* * * * *

A RISING young tenor of Burlington has a neck eight inches long, and it gives him an immense power over his voice; enables him to throat a long ways. (Tra, la, la!)

* * * * *

THE whale is the sulkiest of all fishes. He is the worst pouter in the business.

* * * * *

ABOUT the oldest little game of draw we know of was played when Joshua razed Jericho, and the fellows of the city wished they hadn’t stayed in.

* * * * *

YOUR landlord is probably the finest example of filial affection and duty you ever met. He is unremitting in his attention to and care of his pay rents.

* * * * *

“WAS it her brother?” is the title of a new novel. We think not. It is our impression that the large gentlemen in a plaid coat, who was kicking him down stairs and calling for the dog, was her brother.

* * * * *

GEORGE WASHINGTON’S strongest hold upon the American people is the fact that he never wore a box coat and a plug hat.

* * * * *

HISTORY says, “Cæsar had his Brutus.” But somehow or other we always had the impression that Brutus rather had Cæsar.

* * * * *

BY some wicked and unpardonable error, the case of the photographs of editors on exhibition at the Centennial got misplaced, and was exhibited in a frame labeled “Native woods of the United States.”

* * * * *

NATURE’S effort to maintain equilibrium is never better set forth than in the instinctive struggles of a man with one suspender to carry both shoulders even.

* * * * *

ON account of the Turco-Russian war and the failure of the American cabbage crop last year, nearly all the genuine imported Turkish tobacco used in this country this Summer will have to be made out of plaintain weed.

* * * * *

THE day after Christmas, father and mother no longer come sneaking in at the back door with mysterious looking bundles. No, indeedy. Mother is gliding around with the expression of a Christian martyr with the toothache, because she didn’t get what she expected, and father is sitting around, holding his breath till the bills come in.

* * * * *

YOU can utilize your cake of maple sugar, if you find there is too much sand in it to make molasses of, by putting it in a neat frame of card-board, or some kind of fancy work, in bright colors, and hanging it up against the wall to light matches on. It never wears out.

* * * * *

FLIES are made for some good and useful purpose after all. If it wasn’t for the busy flies, men with their never dying souls to save and lots of work to do, would lie down after dinner and sleep till six o’clock every day.

* * * * *

A NASHVILLE bank robber burrowed under a street for five days, and at length came up in the coal vault of a beer saloon, three doors away from the bank, and bit himself in eleven places with the most uncompromising dog he ever tried to conciliate. The next time he attempts any mining operations he will take a practical engineer along.

* * * * *

IT was intensely hot in Salt Lake City last Summer, and one night about 1,820 linear feet of prickly heat broke out on the infant backs in Brigham Young’s nursery. The eruption hasn’t been equaled since Mt. Vesuvius cooled off.

* * * * *

IT is in the merry month of Spring that a tree peddler comes around and talks you to death, and sells you a plum tree that bears fruit so bitter that it poisons every curculio that tastes it, and some cherry trees that send up one hundred and fifty sprouts to the square inch and will lift the house off its foundations in two years’ growth, and some apple trees that neither sprout, blossom, nor bear fruit, and some blackberry bushes that spread all over a ten-acre lot the first season, and some gooseberry bushes that have thorns on a foot long, and never have anything else, and some peach trees that break out in bloom from the ground to the tip of the topmost branch five days after they are put in the ground and die as dead as a flint the sixth day, and a climbing rose tree that turns out to be wild ivy and poisons every soul about the house before the Summer is over.

* * * * *

WHEN the late Governor of the Persian province of Fars retired from office, the Government officials put him in the stocks and pounded the soles of his feet until he disgorged $300,000 of crooked salary. If the Government of the United States would adopt that system, five hundred million pairs of crutches would carry the population of the republic to and from its daily labor. And if we knew where we could get hold of a man who would give down like the late worthy Governor of Fars, we would gather him by the ankles, stand him on his head, and welt the soles of his feet until his backbone went through the top of his head and stuck nine inches in the ground.

* * * * *

THERE is a junior in the Burlington high school who, when his father cuffs his scholastic ears for leaving the wheelbarrow standing athwart the front gate, can go out to the woodshed and swear in French, grumble in German, threaten to run away and be a pirate in good classic Greek, and blubber in honest United States.

* * * * *

ONE day last Winter a young lady broke through the ice of a deep skating pond near Toronto, and a young man rescued her at the risk of his own life. As the half drowned girl was recovering consciousness, her agonized father arrived on the spot. Taking one of her cold, white hands in one of his own, he reached out the other for the hand of her rescuer, but the young man, realizing his danger, with one frightened glance broke for the woods, and was soon lost to view. He has not been heard of since, and it is supposed that he is traveling in the United States under the false and hollow name of Smith.

* * * * *