Chapter III: Preface (3)

Before she got to the corner of the street she was hailed again.

“Eleanor! Eleanor! Eleanor Man! Did you wear off my coat?”

She paused and turned, after signaling the street car to stop, and cried,

“You threw it on the silver closet.”

And the street car engulfed her graceful figure and she was seen no more. But the neighbors say that they heard Mr. Man charging up and down the house, rushing out at the front door every now and then, and shrieking up the deserted streets after the unconscious Mrs. Man, to know where his hat was, and where she put the valise key, and if she had any clean socks and undershirts, and that there wasn’t a linen collar in the house. And when he went away at last, he left the kitchen door, side door and front door, all the down-stair windows and the front gate wide open. And the loungers around the depot were somewhat amused just as the train was pulling out of sight down in the yards, to see a flushed, perspiring man, with his hat on sideways, his vest buttoned two buttons too high, his cuffs unbuttoned and necktie flying and his gripsack flapping open and shut like a demented shutter on a March night, and a door key in his hand, dash wildly across the platform and halt in the middle of the track, glaring in dejected, impotent, wrathful mortification at the departing train, and shaking his trembling fist at a pretty woman, who was throwing kisses at him from the rear platform of the last car.

DRIVING THE COW.

Mr. Forbes is a nervous man, and it is not surprising that when Mrs. Forbes told him the cow had got out at the front gate, he was so startled and annoyed that he made some disjointed allusions to the scene of General Newton’s dynamite explosions. When he went out the cow was standing very quietly in the street, just in front of the gate, chewing her cud, best navy, and looking as though she were trying to think of something mean to say. Mr. Forbes got around in front of her, raised both his hands above his head, and, extending his arms, waved them slowly up and down, at the same time ejaculating, “Shoo! shoo, there, I say! Shoo!” The cow turned her cud over to the other side, and gazed at the apparition in some astonishment, and then began to back away and maneuver to get around it. It is a remarkable fact, which we have never heard Prof. Huxley explain, that a cow is perfectly willing to go in any direction save the one in which you attempt to drive her. When the cow began to back, Mr. Forbes slowed up with his arms and assumed a more coaxing tone. When the cow started to make a flank movement off to the right, Mr. Forbes kept in front of her by sidling across in the same direction, at the same time raising his voice and accelerating the movement of his arms. When the cow made several cautious diversions and reconnoissances this way and that, Mr. Forbes was compelled to keep up a kind of Chinese cotillon, dancing to and fro across the road, keeping time with his shuffling feet and waving hands, and the children on their way to school gathered in little groups on the sidewalk and viewed the spectacle with great interest, alternately cheering the cow and encouraging Mr. Forbes, as one side or the other would gain a little advantage. When the cow would make a short, determined rush, causing Mr. Forbes to scuttle across the street, in a perfect whirlwind of dust and sticks and a rattling volley of “Hi! hoo-y! shoo, there! hoo-y!” the enthusiasm of the audience was unbounded. Once, Mr. Forbes got the cow fairly cornered and headed her right into the gate, but just as the gray light of victory fell upon his uplifted face, Mrs. Forbes and the hired girl came charging out in mad pursuit of a flock of geese that had taken advantage of the open gate to stroll in and have a nip at the house plants on the back porch. Squacking, whooping and screaming, the flying geese and the pursuing column came out like a runaway edition of chaos, and the cow gave a snort of terror and turned short upon Mr. Forbes, who tossed his hands more wildly and shouted more vociferously than ever, and got out of the way with neatness and dispatch, just as the cow went by with the swiftness of a golden opportunity or a vagrant thought. Mr. Forbes’ blood was up, and he was bound to head off that cow if it was in the power of man. Spurred to intense energy, by the derisive shouts of the children, he bent his head and picked up his flying feet. They got a pretty fair send off, Mr. Forbes and the cow, and as they swept up the street, they could look into each other’s eyes and glare defiance while they spurned the dust with flying feet. Mr. Forbes ran until his eyes seemed bursting out of his head and his very soul seemed to be in his legs; the perspiration started out of every pore; every time he struck the ground with his foot he thought he felt the earth shake, and yet, though he tugged and sweat and strained until all the landscape was yellow before his blood-shot eyes, he couldn’t gain a hair’s breadth on the shambling, awkward cow that went sprawling and kicking along by his side, filling the soft September air with such a wild, tumultuous, horrible jangling of bells that Forbes made up his mind to throw the bell away the moment he get the cow home. The people on the streets stopped and waved their hats and cheered enthusiastically as the procession swept past, ladies leaned out of the windows and smiled sweetly on the man and cow alike. Once Forbes stumbled over a crossing and had to take strides twenty-three feet long for the next half block to keep from falling, and he was sure he was split clear up to the chin and would have to button his trousers around his neck forever afterward, but he wouldn’t give in to a cow if he died for it. At the next corner the cow turned off down a side street; Forbes shot across the sidewalk for a short cut, and the next instant he went crashing half-way through a latticed tree box. A street car driver stopped his car and assisted Mr. Forbes to a sitting posture, leaned him up against a fence and went on with his train. And as Mr. Forbes sat in a dazed kind of way, mechanically rubbing the dust and dirt off his coat and pinning up long gashes and grimly grinning apertures in his clothes, there came to his ears the distant tinkle-tankle of a far away cow bell, the mellowed sound rising and falling in tender cadences, with a dreamy, swaying melody, as though the bell was somewhere over in the adjoining county, and the cow that wore it was waltzing along over a country road a thousand miles a minute.

VOICES OF THE NIGHT.

Mr. Joskins is not an old settler in Burlington. He came to the city of magnificent hills from Keokuk, and after looking around, selected a residence out on West Hill, because it was in such a quiet locality, and Mr. Joskins loves peace and seclusion. It is a rural kind of a neighborhood, and all of Mr. Joskins’ neighbors keep cows. And every cow wears a bell. And with an instinct worthy of the Peak family, each neighbor had selected a cow bell of a different key and tone from any of the others, in order that he might know the cow of his heart from the other kine of the district. So that Mr. Joskins’ nights are filled with music, of a rather wild, barbaric type; and the lone starry hours talk nothing but cow to him, and he has learned so exactly the tones of every bell and the habits of each corresponding cow, that the voices of the night are not an unintelligible jargon to him, but they are full of intelligence, and he understands them. It makes it much easier for Mr. Joskins, who is a very nervous man, than if he had to listen and conjecture and wonder until he was fairly wild, as the rest of us would have to do. As it is, when the first sweet moments of his slumber are broken by a solemn, ponderous, resonant

“Ka-lum, ka-lum, ka-lum!”

Mr. Joskins knows that the widow Barbery’s old crumple horn is going down the street looking for an open front gate, and his knowledge is confirmed by a doleful “Ka-lum-pu-lum!” that occurs at regular intervals as old crumple pauses to try each gate as she passes it, for she knows that appearances are deceitful, and that a boy can shut a front gate in such a way as to thoroughly deceive his father and yet leave every catch unfastened. Then when Mr. Joskins is called up from his second doze by a lively serenade of

“To-link, to-lank, lank, lankle-inkle, lankle-inkle-tekinleinkletelink, kink, kink!”

He knows that Mr. Throop’s young brindle is in Throstlewaite’s garden and that Throstlewaite is sailing around after her in a pair of slippers and a few clothes. And by sitting up in bed Mr. Joskins can hear the things that Mr. Throstlewaite is throwing strike against the side of the house and the woodshed, thud, spat, bang, and the character of the noises tells him whether the missile was a clod, a piece of board, or a brick. And when the wind down the street is fair, it brings with it faint echoes of Mr. Throstlewaite’s remarks, which bring into Mr. Joskins’ bedroom the odor of bad grammatical construction and wicked wishes and very ill-applied epithets. Then when the final crash and tinkle announce that the cow has bulged through the front fence and got away, and Mr. Joskins turns over to try and get a little sleep, he is not surprised, although he is annoyed, to be aroused by a sepulchral

“Klank, klank, klank!”

Like the chains on the old-fashioned ghost of a murdered man, for he knows it is Throstlewaite’s old duck-legged brown cow, going down to the vacant lot on the corner to fight anything that gives milk. And he waits and listens to the “klank, klank, klank,” until it reaches the corner and a terrific din and medley of all the cow bells on the street tell him all the skirmishers have been driven in and the action has become general. And from that on till morning, Mr. Joskins hears the “tinkle-tankle” of the little red cow going down the alley to prospect among the garbage heaps, and the “rankle-tankle, tankle-tankle” of the short-tailed black and white cow skirmishing down the street ahead of an escort of badly assorted dogs, and the “tringle-de-ding, tringle-de-ding, ding, ding,” of the muley cow that goes along on the sidewalk, browsing on the lower limbs of the shade trees, and the “klank, klank, klank,” of the fighting cow, whose bell is cracked in three places, and incessant “moo-o-_oo_-ah-ha” of the big black cow that has lost the clapper out of her bell and has ever since kept up an unintermittent bellowing to supply its loss. And Mr. Joskins knows all these cows by their bells, and he knows what they are doing and where they are going. And although it has murdered his dreams of a quiet home, yet it has given him an opportunity to cultivate habits of intelligent observation, and it has induced him to register a vow that if he is ever rich enough he will keep nine cows, trained to sleep all day so as to be ready for duty at night, and he will live in the heart of the city with them and make them wear four bells apiece just for the pleasure of his neighbors.

THE DEMAND FOR LIGHT LABOR.

One morning, just as the rush of house-cleaning days was beginning to abate, a robust tramp called at a house on Barnes Street, and besought the inmates to give him something to eat, averring that he had not tasted food for nine days.

“Why don’t you go to work?” asked the lady to whom he preferred his petition.

“Work!” he ejaculated. “Work! And what have I been doing ever since the middle of May but hunting work? Who will give me work? When did I ever refuse work?”

“Well,” said the woman, “I guess I can give you some employment. What can you do?”

“Anything!” he shouted, in a kind of delirious joy. “Anything that any man can do. I’m sick for something to fly at. Why, only yesterday I worked all day, carrying water in an old sieve from Flint River and emptying it into the Mississippi, just because I was so tired of having nothing to do, that I had to work at something or I would have gone ravin’ crazy. I’ll do anything, from cleaning house to building a steamboat. Jest give me work, ma’am, an’ you’ll never hear me ask for bread agin.”

The lady was pleased at the willingness and anxiety of this industrious man to do something, and she led him to the wood-pile.

“Here,” she said, “you can saw and split this wood, and if you are a good, industrious worker, I will find work for you to do, nearly all Winter.”

“Well, now,” said the tramp, while a look of disappointment stole over his face, “that’s just my luck. Only three days ago I was pullin’ a blind cow out of a well for a poor widow woman who had nothin’ in the world but that cow to support her, an’ I spraint my right wrist till I hain’t been able to lift a pound with it sinst. You kin jest put your hand on it now and feel it throb, it’s so painful and inflamed. I could jest cry of disappointment, but it’s a Bible fact, ma’am, that I couldn’t lift that ax above my head ef I died fur it, and I’d jest as lief let you pull my arm out by the roots as to try to pull that saw through a lath. Jest set me at something I kin do, though, if you want to see the dust fly.”

“Very well,” said the lady, “then you can take these flower beds, which have been very much neglected, and weed them very carefully for me. You can do that with your well hand, but I want you to be very particular with them, and get them very clean, and not injure any of the plants, for they are all very choice and I am very proud of them.”

The look of disappointment that had been chased away from the industrious man’s face when he saw a prospect of something else to do, came back deeper than ever as the lady described the new job, and when she concluded, he had to remain quiet for a moment before he could control his emotion sufficiently to speak.

“If I ain’t the most onfortnit man in Ameriky,” he sighed. “I’m jest dyin’ for work; crazy to get somethin’ to do, and I’m blocked out of work at every turn. I jest love to work among flowers and dig in the ground, but I never dassent do it fur I’m jest blue ruin among the posies. Nobody ever cared to teach me anythin’ about flowers and its a Gospel truth, ma’am, I can’t tell a violet from a sunflower nor a red rose from a dog-fennel. Last place I tried to git work at, woman of the house set me to work weedin’ the garden, an’ I worked about a couple of hours, monstrous glad to get work, now you bet, an’ I pulled up every last livin’ green thing in that yard. Hope I may die ef I didn’t. Pulled up all the grass, every blade of it. Fact. Pulled up a vine wuth seventy-five dollars, that had roots reachin’ cl’ar under the cellar and into the cistern, and I yanked ’em right up, every fiber of ’em. Woman was so heart broke when she come out and see the yard just as bare as the floor of a brick yard that they had to put her to bed. Bible’s truth, they did, ma’am; and I had to work for that house three months for nothin’ and find my board, to pay fur the damage I done. Hope to die ef I didn’t. Jest gimme suthin’ I kin do, I’ll show you what work is, but I wouldn’t dare to go foolin’ around no flowers. You’ve got a kind heart ma’am, gimme some work; don’t send a despairin’ man away hungry for work.”

“Well,” the lady said, “you can beat my carpets for me. They have just been taken up, and you can beat them thoroughly, and by the time they are done, I will have something else ready for you.”

The man made a gesture of despair and sat down on the ground, the picture of abject helplessness and disappointed aspirations.

“Look at me now,” he exclaimed. “What is goin’ to become o’ me? Did you ever see a man so down on his luck like me? I tell you ma’am, you must give me somethin’ I can do. I wouldn’t no more dare for to tech them carpets than nothin’ in the world. I’d tear ’em to pieces. I’m a awful hard hitter, an’ the last time I beat any carpets was for a woman out at Creston, and I just welted them carpets into strings and carpet rags. I couldn’t help it. I can’t hold in my strength. I’m too glad to get to work, that’s the trouble with me, ma’am, it’s a Bible fact. I’ll beat them carpets if you say so, but I won’t be responsible fur ’em; no makin’ me work for nothin’ fur five or six weeks to pay fur tearin’ ’em into slits yer know. I’ll go at ’em if you’ll say the word and take the responsibility, but the fact is, I’m too hard a worker to go foolin’ around carpets, that’s just what I am.”

The lady excused the energetic worker from going at the carpets, but was puzzled what to set him at. Finally she asked him what there was he would like to do and could do, with safety to himself and the work.

“Well, now,” he said, “that’s considerit in ye. That’s real considerit, and I’ll take a hold and do something that’ll give ye the wuth of your money, and won’t give me no chance to destroy nothin’ by workin’ too hard at it. If ye’ll jest kindly fetch me out a rockin’ chair, I’ll set down in the shade and keep the cows from liftin’ the latch of the front gate and gettin’ into the yard. An’ I’ll do it well and only charge you reasonable for it, fur the fact is I’m so dead crazy fur work that it isn’t big pay I want so much as a steady job.”

And when he was rejected and sent forth, jobless and breakfastless, to wander up and down the cold, unfeeling world in search of work, he cast stones at the house and said, in dejected tones,

“There, now, that’s just the way. They call us a bad lot, and say we’re lazy and thieves, and won’t work, when a feller is just crazy to work and nobody won’t give him nary job that he kin do. Won’t work! Land alive, they won’t give us work, an’ when we want to an’ try to, they won’t let us work. There ain’t a man in Ameriky that ’ud work as hard an’ as stiddy as I would if they’d gimme a chance.”

MASTER BILDERBACK RETURNS TO SCHOOL.

We remember one day last Summer, during the long vacation, when the _Hawkeye_ published a news item stating that a boy named Bilderback had fallen from the seat of a reaping machine, and got cut to pieces, a patient, weary looking, and rather handsome young lady called at the office, and appeared to be very anxious to have that item verified. And when we gave her all possible assurance that everything appearing in that great and good paper, the _Hawkeye_, was necessarily true, she drew a deep sigh of relief, and said she felt actually thankful she wouldn’t have that boy to demoralize the school the next term. And then she smiled sweetly, and thanked us for our assuring words, and went away.

Imagine her dismay, then, about the third or fourth day of the fall term, when a terrific cheering in the yard, about ten minutes before school time, drew her to the window, whence looking down, she saw every last solitary lingering boy in that school district dancing and yelling about Master Bilderback, who was dancing higher and yelling louder than any other boy in the caucus. Her heart sank within her; but she braced up and went down stairs to quiet the bedlam, and in five minutes learned the dreadful truth. Master Bilderback had met with a reaping-machine accident, but the papers had reported it incorrectly. He had climbed into the seat the moment his uncle, on whose farm he was spending the vacation, got down. He prodded one of the horses with a pin in the end of a stick, and made the team run away. The terrified animals ran the machine over twenty stumps, and mashed it to pieces; one of the horses ran against a hedge-stake and was killed, and the other jumped off a bridge and broke a leg; Master Bilderback’s uncle, chasing after the flying team, had dashed through a hornets’ nest, and the sociable little insects came out and sat down on him to talk it over, until his head was swelled as big as a nail-keg, and he couldn’t open his eyes for a week; a farm-hand who tried to stop the horses by rushing out in front of them, was hit by the tongue of the reaper and knocked into the middle of an Osage orange hedge, where he stuck for three hours, and lost his voice by screaming, and was scraped to the bone when they finally pulled him out with grappling hooks. And Master Bilderback, the author of all this calamity, was thrown from his seat at the first stump, and fell on a shock of grain, and wasn’t jarred or bruised or scratched a particle. And that night, when his aunt handed his blinded uncle the halter-strap, and held Master Bilderback in front of him to receive merited castigation, that graceless young wretch seized his aunt around the neck after the first blow, and wheeling her into his place, held her there, drowning her piercing explanations and pleadings in his own tumultuous but deceitful howlings and roarings, until her back looked like a war map, and the exhausted uncle laid down the strap with the remark that he “guessed that would teach him something.” And so the teacher, when she saw Master Bilderback at school again, felt weary of life, and sighed to rest her deep in the silent grave--if she could find one that was for rent, and didn’t cost more than a quarter’s salary.

It being the young man’s first day at school that term, he was feeling pretty well, thank you. He had a fight and a half before the bell rang; the half fight being an unsuccessful attempt on his part to pull enough hair out of the back of another boy’s head to stuff a mattress, and a highly successful effort on the part of the other boy to claw enough hide off Master Bilderback’s nose to make a pair of boots of, at which discouraging stage of the war Master B. drew off his forces, and in a conciliatory spirit informed the audience that he was only in fun. Then, before the opening exercises were half through, three boys in his neighborhood rose up in their seats and with bitter wails began feeling about in their persons for intrusive pins. When the first class filed out to its place, the circling grin told the anxious teacher that Master Bilderback had inked the end of his nose. Then he induced the boy next to him to lean his head back against the wall, just as Master B. did; and when that complaisant boy was suddenly called on to rise and recite, he lifted up his voice and wept, for he had pulled a piece of shoemaker’s wax and about two ounces of blackboard slating and plaster out of the wall with his back hair. Then he spread out the tail of another boy’s coat on the seat, and piled a little pyramid of buckshot on it; and when the boy stood up to recite, he was waltzed out on the floor--bathed in innocent tears, and protesting his innocence--for throwing shot on the floor, and was told he was growing worse than that Bilderback boy. He tied the ends of a girl’s sash around the back of her chair, and when she tried to stand up she was almost jerked out of existence. He was sent out with a boy who was taken with the nose-bleed, and found occasion to mix ink in the water he poured on the sufferer’s hands; so that, on his return, the sufferer’s appearance created such howls of derision that it started the nose-bleed afresh, and threw the teacher into hysterics. He enticed a gaunt hound into the girls’ side of the yard, and clapping a patent clothes-pin on one of its pendant ears, raised the alarm of “mad dog!” and laughed till he choked to see the howling animal rushing around trying to paw the clothes-pin off; while the shrieking girls wrecked themselves in desperate and frequently successful attempts to climb over an eight foot fence. He put a pinching-bug as big as a postage-stamp down a boy’s back. He got a long slate-pencil crossways in his mouth, and it nearly poked through his cheeks before they could break it and get it out. He tossed a big apple, hard as a rock, out of the third story window at random, and it struck an old lady in the eye as she was walking along admiring the building; and she came up and gave the poor tortured teacher a piece of her mind as long as the dog days. He dropped into the water-bucket a lot of oxalic acid, that had been brought to take some ink splotches out of the floor, and came within one of poisoning the whole school before they found it out; and, finally, he poked a bean so far up his nose that they thought it was coming out of his eye; and the happy teacher dismissed him, thoroughly frightened for the first time in his eventful life, and he ran like a race-horse all the way home, crying louder at every step, and never stopped to call a name or throw a stone.

ODE TO AUTUMN.

AFTER TENNYSON.

The grasshopper creaks in the leafy gloom,
And the bumble-bee bumbleth the live long day;
But the mathering nurks in the bran new broom,
And hushed is the sound of the buzz saw’s play.

Oh, it’s little he thinks of the cold mince pie,
And it’s little he seeks of the raw ice cream;
For the dying old year with its tremulous sigh,
Shall waken the lingering loon from his dream.

Oh, list! For the cricket, now far, now near,
Full shrillfully singeth his roundelay;
While the negligent noodle his noisy cheer
Screeps where the doodle bug eats the hay.

Oh, the buzz saw so buzzily buzzeth the stick
And bumbling the bumble-bee bumbleth his tune
While the cricket cricks crickingly down at the creek
And the noodle noods noodingly, “Ha! It is noon!”

The dog-fennel sighs, “She is here! she is here!”
And the smart weed says dreamily, “Give us a rest!”
The hop vine breathes tenderly, “Give us a beer!”
While the jimson weed hollers, “Oh, pull down your vest!”

Oh, Anna Maria, why don’t you come home?
For the clock in the steeple strikes seven or eight;
Way down in the murky mazourka the gloam
Is gloaming its gloamingest gloam on the gate.

THE SORROWS OF THE POOR.

It was a poor, dejected looking tramp, who came limping wearily into town on the Fort Madison road, and, with the instinct of his class, made his way directly toward Main Street, where stimulants and company are most numerous. He had a very tired look, and his poorly shod feet seemed to weigh a ton a piece. The sun had burned his face to a deeper brown than even the knotty hands that swung listlessly at his side. He did not even carry the inevitable stick; and the little bundle, without which the tramp’s outfit is never complete, although heaven only knows what is in it, was swung from his shoulders by a heavy twine string, like a rude knapsack. No man is alive now that wore clothes when the hat he wore was made. It was a fearful and wonderful hat, and attracted more attention than anything he had on or about him. He limped along Main Street from Locust, diving into private houses in occasional forays for bread, which were generally successful, for his poor, dejected, sorrowful looking face threw a great deal of silent eloquence into his pleading, and the women could not bear to send the low-voiced man away hungry. These forays were varied by occasional dives into places of refreshment, where he vainly pleaded for a small allowance of ardent spirits for a sick man; the general result being that he was courteously refused and gently but firmly kicked out by the urbane barkeeper, who saw too many of him every day to be much moved. The poor fellow limped along till he got a little above Division Street, when he had to pass a knot of young men, and one of them, a smart looking young chap, in a very gamey costume, and carrying a broad pair of shoulders and a bullet head, surmounted with a silver-gray plug hat, hung on his right ear, sang out,

“Oh, shoot the hat!”

The poor tramp only looked more dejected than ever, if possible, and shook his head meekly and sorrowfully, and limped on. But the young sport shouted after him:

“Come back, young fellow, and see how you’ll trade hats!”

The outcast paused and half turned, and said in mournful tones:

“Don’t make game of a onfortnit man, young gents. I’m poor and I’m sick, but I’ve the feelin’s of a man, an’ I kin feel it when I’m made game of. If you could give me a job of work, now--”

A chorus of laughter greeted the suggestion, and the smartest young man repeated his challenge to trade hats, and finally induced the mendicant to limp back.

“Take off your hat,” said the young man of Burlington, “and let’s see whose make it is. If it isn’t Stetson’s, I won’t trade.”

“Oh, that’s Stetson’s,” chorused the crowd. “He wouldn’t wear anything but a first-class hat.”

But the tramp replied, trying to limp away from the circle that was closing around him.

“Indeed, young gents, don’t be hard on a onfortnit man. I don’t believe I could git that hat off’n my head; I don’t indeed. I haint had it off fur mor’n two months, indeed I haint. I don’t believe I kin git it off at all. Please let me go on.”

But the unfeeling young men crowded around him more closely and insisted that the hat should come off, and the smartest young man in company said he’d pull it off for him.

“Indeed, young gent,” replied the tramp, apologetically, “I don’t believe you could git it off. It’s been on so long I don’t believe you kin git it off; I don’t really.”

The young man advanced and made a motion to jerk off the hat, but the tramp limped back and threw up his hands with a clumsy frightened gesture.

“Come young gents,” he whined, “don’t play games on a poor fellow as is lookin’ for the county hospital. I tell ye, young gents, I’m a sick man, I am. I’m on the tramp when I ought to be in bed. I can’t hardly stand, and I haint got the strength to be fooled with. Be easy on a poor----”

But the sporting young man cut him off with “Oh, give us a rest and take off that hat.” And then he made a pass at the poor sick man’s hat, but his hand met the poor, sick tramp’s elbow instead. And then the poor man lifted one of his hands about as high as a derrick, and the next instant the silver-gray plug hat was crowded so far down on the young man’s shoulders that the points of the dog’s eared collar were sticking up through the crown of it. And then the poor sick man tried his other hand, and part of the crowd started off to help pick the young man out of a show window where he was standing on his head, while the rest of the congregation was trying its level best to get out of the way of the poor sick tramp, who was feeling about him in a vague, restless sort of way that made the street lamps rattle every time he found anybody. Long before any one could interfere the convention had adjourned _sine die_, and the poor tramp, limping on his way, the very personification of wretchedness, sighed as he remarked apologetically to the spectators:

“I tell you, gents, I’m a sick man; I’m too sick to feel like foolin’; I’m jest so sick that when I go gropin’ around for somethin’ to lean up agin I can’t tell a man from a hitchin’ post; I can’t actually, and when I rub agin anybody, nobody hadn’t ought to feel hard at me. I’m sick, that’s wha’ I am.”

MR. GEROLMAN LOSES HIS DOG.

Mr. Gerolman stood on the front porch of his comfortable home on West Hill, one morning looking out at the drizzling rain in any thing but a comfortable frame of mind. He looked up and down the yard, and then he raised his umbrella and went to the gate and looked up and down the street. Then he whistled in a very shrill manner three or four times, and listened as though he was expecting a response. If he was, he was disappointed, for there was no response save the pattering of the rain on his umbrella, and he frowned heavily as he returned to the porch, from which sheltered post of observation he gloomily surveyed the dispiriting weather.

“Dag gone the dag gone brute,” he muttered savagely, “if ever I keep another dog again, I hope it will eat me up.”

And then he whistled again. And again there was no response. It was evident that Mr. Gerolman had lost his dog, a beautiful ashes of roses hound with seal brown spots and soft satin-finish ears. He was a valuable dog, and this was the third time he had been lost, and Mr. Gerolman was rapidly losing his temper as completely as he had lost his dog. He lifted his voice and called aloud:

“H’yuh-h-h Ponto! h’yuh Ponto! h’yuhp onto! h’yup onto, h’yup onto h’yuponto, h’yuponto! h’yup, h’yup, h’yup!”

As he ceased calling, and looked anxiously about for some indications of a dog, the front door opened and a woman’s face, shaded with a tinge of womanly anxiety and fastened to Mrs. Gerolman’s head, looked out.

“The children call him Hector,” a low sweet voice said for the wistful, pretty face; but the bereaved master of the absent dog was in no humor to be charmed by a beautiful face and a flute-like voice.

“By George,” he said, striding out into the rain and purposely leaving his umbrella on the porch to make his wife feel bad, “it’s no wonder the dog gets lost, when he has so dod binged many names that he don’t know himself. By Jacks, when I give eleven dollars for a dog, I want the privilege of naming him, and the next person about this house that tries to fasten an old pagan, Indian, blasphemous name on a dog of mine, will hear from me about it; now that’s all.”

And then he inflated his lungs and yelled like a scalp hunter.

“Here, Hector! here, Hector! here rector, hyur, rector, hyur rec, h’yurrec, k’yurrec, k’yurrec, k’yurrec! Godfrey’s cordial, where’s that dog gone to? H’yuponto, h’yupont! h’yuh, h’yuh, h’yuh! I hope he’s poisoned--h’yurrector! By George, I do; h’yuh Ponto, good dog, Ponty, Ponty, Ponty, h’yuh Pont! I’d give fifty dollars if some one had strychnined the nasty, worthless, lop-eared cur; hyurrec, k’yurrec! By granny, I’ll kill him when he comes home, if I don’t I hope to die; h’yuh Ponto, h’yuh Ponto, _h’yuh_ HEC!!”

And as he turned back to the porch the door again opened and the tremulous voice sweetly asked:

“Can’t you find him?”

“NAW!!!” roared the exasperated dog hunter, and the door closed very precipitately and was opened no more during the session.

“Here, Ponto!” roared Mr. Gerolman, from his position on the porch, “Here, Hector!” And then he whistled until his head swam and his throat was so dry you could light a match in it. “Here, Ponto! Blast the dog. I suppose he’s twenty-five miles from here. Hector! What are you lookin’ at, you gimlet-eyed old Bedlamite?” he savagely growled, apostrophizing a sweet-faced old lady with silky white hair, who had just looked out of her window to see where the fire was, or who was being murdered. “Here, Ponto! here Ponto! Good doggie, nice old Pontie, nice old Heckie dog--Oh-h-h,” he snarled, dancing up and down on the porch in an ecstasy of rage and impatience, “I’d like to tramp the ribs out of the long-legged worthless old garbage-eater; _here, Ponto, here!_”

To his amazement he heard a canine yawn, a long-drawn, weary kind of a whine, as of a dog who was bored to death with the dismal weather; then there was a scraping sound, and the dog, creeping out from under the porch, from under his very feet, looked vacantly around as though he wasn’t quite sure but what he had heard some one calling him, and then catching sight of his master, sat down and thumped on the ground with his tail, smiled pleasantly, and asked as plainly as ever dog asked in the world,

“Were you wanting me?”

Mr. Gerolman, for one brief instant, gasped for breath. Then he pulled his hat down tight on his head, snatched up his umbrella with a convulsive grasp and yelled “Come ’ere!” in such a terrific roar that the white-haired old lady across the way fell back in a fit, and the dog, surmising that all was not well, briefly remarked that he had an engagement to meet somebody about fifty-eight feet under the house, and shot under the porch like a shooting dog-star. Mr. Gerolman made a dash to intercept him, but stumbled over a flower stand and plunged through a honey-suckle trellis, off the porch, and down into a raging volcano of moss-rose bush, straw, black dirt, shattered umbrella ribs, and a ubiquitous hat, while far under the house, deep in the cavernous darkness, came the mocking laugh of an ashes of roses dog with seal brown spots, accompanied by the taunting remark, as nearly as Mr. Gerolman could understand the dog,

“Who hit him? Which way did he go?”

A RAINY DAY IDYL.

How many times do I love you, dear?
That is beyond my number’s skill;
Dearer your smiles than aught else here,
Unless it might be my amberill.

Sweet is the glance of your soft brown eyes,
Veiled when the silken fringes fall;
Verse can not tell how much I prize
Thee, and my constant umbersoll.

As the shadowy years speed on and by
Over our lives like a magic spell;
Ever to thee I’ll fondly fly,
And shelter you under my amberell.

Time’s wings are swifter than thought, my dear,
When my heart is cheered by your sunny smile;
Never an hour is sad or drear,
When I know where to look for my old umbrile.

Even when life its sands have run
And my leaf has fallen sere and yellow,
Little I’ll heed either storm or sun
Safe ’neath the roof of my dear umbrellow.

Ha! But the world is wrapped in gloom--
Storm, rain and tempest round me roll;
Show me the man! Oh, give me room!
Some wretch has stolen my umbersole.

SINGULAR TRANSFORMATION.

It appears that during vacation Master Bilderback, having fallen behind in his studies last term, was compelled by his ma to read his school books certain hours of the day, until he escaped that tyranny by going out to his uncle Keyser’s farm. In order to make his study as light as possible, this ingenious boy had dissected, or rather skinned his books, and neatly inserted in their covers certain works of the most thrilling character known in modern literature. When he came back from the farm this transformation business had entirely escaped his memory, and it was not even recalled when he heard his mother tell the teacher, who called in the hopes of learning that that bean had sprouted and grown into his brain and would probably terminate fatally, that he was the best boy to study during vacation she ever saw, and would pore for hours over his books, and even seem anxious to get at them. Master Bilderback had forgotten all about it, and only thought it was some of his mother’s foolishness, of which he believed her to possess great store. As for the bean, the amazed teacher learned that it never was discovered, it never came out and it never hurt him a particle, and had just naturally ceased to be. And the teacher went sadly away, moralizing over this case, and that of little Ezra Simpson, the best and most obedient, and most studious, and quietest, and most lovable boy in her school who, one day stumbled and ran the end of a slate-pencil into his nose and died the next day. And long, long after she had got out of sight of Bilderback’s house, she could hear the hopeful Master Bilderback shouting, “Shoot that hat!” and “Pull down your vest!” to gentlemen driving, with their families or sweethearts, past the mansion. Dreadful boy, she thought, he will surely come to some end, some day.

Well, it was only the next day when the reading class was called, Master Bilderback took his place for the first time. The boy next to him had no book, and as he was called first, he just took Master Bilderback’s, who turned to look on with the boy on the other side. The class was reading the selection from “Old Curiosity Shop,” and a girl had just finished reading the tender paragraphs, “She was dead. Dear, gentle, patient, noble Nell was dead. Her little bird--a poor slight thing the pressure of a finger would have crushed--was stirring nimbly in its cage, and the strong heart of its child-mistress was mute and motionless forever.”

Imagine the feeling of the teacher when the boy who got up with Master Bilderback’s reader went on:

“‘Black fiend of the nethermost gloom, down to thy craven soul thou liest,’ exclaimed Manfred, the Avenger, drawing his rapier, ‘Draw, malignant hound, and die!’”

“‘Down, perjured fool! Villain and double-dyed traitor, down with thy caitiff face in the dust. Dare’st thou defy me? Beast with a pig’s head, thy doom is sealed!’ exclaimed the Mystic Knight, throwing up his visor. ‘Dost know me now? I am the Mad Muncher of the Bazzarooks!’”

“Manfred, the Avenger, dropped his blade at this terrible name, and--”

The teacher caught her breath and stopped the boy. In tones of forced calmness she asked what he was reading, and he told her it was Bilderback’s reader, and looked in amazement at the innocent scholastic back and the villainous interior, which was nothing less than “The Blood on the Ceiling; or, the Death Track of the Black Snoozer.” After requesting Master Bilderback to remain after school and explain, she called the next class, one in Arithmetic.

“Fisher,” she said, “you may read and analyze the fourth problem.”

And Fisher, who was Bilderback’s next seat mate, and had taken that young man’s book by mistake, rose and read,

“The purtiest little baby, oh!
That ever I did see, oh!
They gave it paregoric, oh!
And sent it up to glory, oh!

Fillacy, follacy, my black hen,
She lays eggs for gentlemen;
Sometimes----”

“In mercy’s name,” shrieked the poor teacher, “what have you got there?” And investigation revealed the rather humiliating fact that when Mrs. Bilderback thought her young son was poring over mathematical problems, he was learning choice vocal selections out of “The Pull-Back Songster and Ethiopian Glee Book.”

When the grammar class was called, the teacher asked some one to bring her a book. Master Bilderback was the nearest, and he handed her his, innocently enough, for he had been busy with more projects than we could tell about in a week, since the arithmetic class had gone down. The teacher was tired and listless with that wearing worry and torture which is only found in the school room, and she listlessly and mechanically opened the book at the place, and said,

“Mamie, how would you analyze and parse this sentence,” and casting her eyes on the page, she read:

“Ofer you dond vas got some glothes on, go on dark blaces, off you blease. Ain’d it?”

She laid down the book, and burst into hysterical tears, unable even to exert her authority to restrain the mirth that burst out all over the school room. She dismissed the school, and had not sufficient energy to punish even Master Bilderback, and that young gentleman only carried home a note to his father, requesting that citizen and tax payer to reorganize his son’s school library before he sent him back to that palladium of our country’s liberties, the public school.

SUBURBAN SOLITUDE.

Mr. Dresseldorf, who can’t endure any noise since he sold his clarionet, has just moved into the sweetest little cottage out on South Hill, and here, he told Mrs. Dresseldorf, he would rest and spend his declining days under his own vine and fig tree, with no one to molest or make him afraid. “We have a few neighbors,” he said, the afternoon they got comfortably and cozily settled; “Mr. Blodgers, next door, keeps a cow, and will supply us with an abundance of pure, fresh milk; Mr. Whackem, not far away, is an honest teamster, I understand, and will be convenient when we want a little hauling done from town; Mr. Sturvesant, just down the street, has a splendid dog that he says keeps an eye on the entire neighborhood, and I think we will live pleasantly and happily here.” And Mr. Dresseldorf sat on the porch and solemnly contemplated the hammer bruises and the tack holes and nail marks and abrasions of stove legs and the pinches of obstinate stove-pipe joints on his hands, and wondered if Providence would be merciful to him and strike the house with lightning before next moving day rolled round. And with this pleasant and soothing thought, Mr. Dresseldorf fell into a trance of ecstatic content, delighted with the holy quiet of the scene and the neighborhood, with Perkins’ meadow in the serene distance, the sun sinking out of sight, throwing long bars of burnished gold through a clump of forest trees off to the west, and the summer air vibrating with the hushed hum of insect life that floated to the Dresseldorf porch. So quiet, so full of peace, so fraught with meditation and retrospective self-communings was the scene, that Mr. Dresseldorf wondered if he could endure so much happiness every evening. Just then,

“Whoa! Who-oh-oh-oh-h!!” Whack! whack! whack! “Whoa! ye son of a thief! Head him, Bill! Whoa!”

“What under the canopy--” began the startled and astonished Mr. Dresseldorf; but just then he saw a gray mule with a paint-brush tail flying down the road, head and tail up, and its heels making vicious offers at every animated object that came within range. It was plain that one of Mr. Whackem’s mules had got away, as the honest teamster and his three sons were seen skirmishing down the street in hot pursuit. Mr. Dresseldorf groaned as the animal was cornered, and his picture of peaceful solitude fled.

“Whoa! Don’t throw at him! Whoa now!” “Head him off, dad!” “Git down the road furder, Bill!” “Whoa, whoa, now!” “Hee haw! hee haw! hee haw!” “Hold on, Tom!” “Hurry up!” “Look out for his heels!” “Now ketch him!” Chorus, “Whoa! Whoa! whoa!” “Hee haw, hee haw, hee haw!” “Whoop!” “Hi!” “Whoop-pee!” “Dog gone the diddledy dog gone mule to thunder!”

Mr. Dresseldorf groaned as the cavalcade went storming and crashing and hallooing down the street. “Thank heaven they’re gone,” he said.

“Sook-kee! sook-kee! sook-kee!”

It sounded like a calliope, only it was too far from the river; but it brought the man of peace to his feet all the same.

“Sook-kee! sook-kee! Suke! suke! seuke!”

It was Mr. Blodgers calling his cow, and as he emphasized the summons by pounding on the bottom of a tin pail with the leg of a milking stool, Mr. Dresseldorf moaned and buried his nervous hands in his hair and tried to pull the top of his head off. While Mr. Blodgers was yelling and pounding, however, a hurricane came tearing up the road--a whirlwind of dust and whoops and paint-brush tails and horns and sticks--and from this awful confusion shot forth yells and brays and bawls and the discordant clangor of a cow bell. Mr. Blodgers ran out into the road, while Mr. Dresseldorf fell on his knees and crammed his fingers in his ears.

“What’n thunder’s chasin’ that keow, I’d like to know?” queried Mr. Blodgers; then, raising his voice, “Hey! Hi! I say! Whoop!” And he was tossed over Mr. Dresseldorf’s fence into a garden urn, and the hurricane passed on up the street, leaving Mr. Blodgers howling like a dervish, and beseeching the demoralized Dresseldorf to bring him some arnica and whisky. The wretched man rose to minister to the sufferings of his neighbor, and got the two needful medicines; but just as he came out of the house the programme changed again. Mr. Sturvesant’s dog, keeping an eye upon the entire neighborhood, had met the whirlwind above mentioned up at the next corner, and had promptly turned it back. This unexpected retrograde movement placed Mr. Whackem, the three Masters Whackem, and a small mob of juvenile volunteers who had been picked up at one point of the chase and another to help catch the mule, directly in the path of the charging mule and Mr. Blodgers’ cow. An immediate adjournment was at once moved and carried, and the entire community lit out for the nearest place of refuge; but Mr. Sturvesant’s dog kept up the chase with such vigor that the whole vociferous, yelling, braying, bawling, barking mass came bulging through Dresseldorf’s front fence, upsetting the owner of the property and carrying him and Mr. Blodgers out into the alley, where the mass fell apart, the animals running to their respective stables, and the “human warious” seeking their homes as soon as they found each other. Mr. Dresseldorf advertised his place for sale the next morning. He is fond of the quiet life of a suburban residence, he says, but it is a little too far from business.

A BURLINGTON ADDER.

Burlington rejoices in a mathematical prodigy. Indeed it is a perfect wonder, and our educational men and teachers used to find a great deal of instruction and some pleasure in interviewing the child, a bright boy of nine years. His name is Alfred J. Talbot, and his parents live at No. 1223 North Main Street. The boy’s health is rather delicate, so that he has not been sent to school a great deal; but he can perform arithmetical feats that remind one of the stories told about Zerah Colburn. He was always bright, and possesses a remarkable memory. In company with two or three members of the school board, we went to the home of the prodigy for an interview. He was marvelously ready with answers to every question. Our easy starters, such as, “Add 6 and 3, and 7 and 8, and 2 and 9 and 5,” were answered like a flash, and correctly every time. Then when we got the little fellow at his ease one of the Directors took him in hand. He said:

“Three times 11, plus 9, minus 17, divided by 3, plus 1, multiplied by 3, less 3, add 7, is how many?”

“Nine,” shouted the boy, almost before the last word was spoken; and the School Inspectors and the newspaper man looked at each other in blank amazement. Then the other Inspector tried it: