The lady, who from habit had her own feet
stowed comfortably away against the warm stomach
of her lord and master, declined to make the investigation
demanded, and resumed the nocturnal
melody. Mr. Zacharias was angered; for the first
time since she had sworn to love, honour, and obey,
this female was in open rebellion. He decided
upon prompt and vigorous action. He quietly
moved over to the back side of the bed and braced
his shoulders against the wall. Drawing up his
sinewy knees to a level with his breast, he placed
the soles of his feet broadly against the back of the
insurgent, with the design of propelling her against
the opposite wall. There was a strangled snort,
then a shriek of female agony, and the neighbours
came in.

Mutual explanations followed, and Mr. Zacharias
walked the streets of Grass Valley next day as if
he were treading upon eggs worth a dollar a dozen.

One of Thomas Jefferson's maxims is as follows:
“When angry, count ten before you speak; if very
angry, count a hundred.” I once knew a man to
square his conduct by this rule, with a most gratifying
result. Jacob Scolliver, a man prone to bad
temper, one day started across the fields to visit his

[figure description] Page 026.[end figure description]

father, whom he generously permitted to till a
small corner of the old homestead. He found the old
gentleman behind the barn, bending over a barrel
that was canted over at an angle of seventy degrees,
and from which issued a cloud of steam. Scolliver
père was evidently scalding one end of a dead pig—
an operation essential to the loosening of the
hair, that the corpse may be plucked and shaven.

“Good morning, father,” said Mr. Scolliver, approaching,
and displaying a long, cheerful smile.
“Got a nice roaster there?” The elder gentleman's
head turned slowly and steadily, as upon a swivel, until
his eyes pointed backward; then he drew his arms
out of the barrel, and finally, revolving his body till
it matched his head, he deliberately mounted upon
the supporting block and sat down upon the sharp
edge of the barrel in the hot steam. Then he replied,
“Good mornin', Jacob. Fine mornin'.”

“A little warm in spots, I should imagine,” returned
the son. “Do you find that a comfortable
seat?” “Why—yes—it's good enough for an old
man,” he answered, in a slightly husky voice, and
with an uneasy gesture of the legs; “don't make much
difference in this life where we set, if we're good—
does it? This world ain't heaven, anyhow, I s'spose.”

“There I do not entirely agree with you,”
rejoined the young man, composing his body
upon a stump for a philosophical argument. “I

[figure description] Page 027.[end figure description]

don't neither,” added the old one, absently, screwing
about on the edge of the barrel and constructing
a painful grimace. There was no argument,
but a silence instead. Suddenly the aged party
sprang off that barrel with exceeding great haste,
as of one who has made up his mind to do a thing
and is impatient of delay. The seat of his trousers
was steaming grandly, the barrel upset, and there
was a great wash of hot water, leaving a deposit of
spotted pig. In life that pig had belonged to Mr.
Scolliver the younger! Mr. Scolliver the younger
was angry, but remembering Jefferson's maxim, he
rattled off the number ten, finishing up with “You—
thief!” Then perceiving himself very angry,
he began all over again and ran up to one hundred,
as a monkey scampers up a ladder. As the last
syllable shot from his lips he planted a dreadful
blow between the old man's eyes, with a shriek that
sounded like—“You son of a sea-cook!”

Mr. Scolliver the elder went down like a stricken
beef, and his son often afterward explained that if he
had not counted a hundred, and so given himself
time to get thoroughly mad, he did not believe he
could ever have licked the old man.

Strolling through Lone Mountain cemetery one
day my attention was arrested by the inconsolable

[figure description] Page 028.[end figure description]

grief of a granite angel bewailing the loss of “Jacob
Hunker, aged 67.” The attitude of utter dejection,
the look of matchless misery upon that angel's face
sank into my heart like water into a sponge. I
was about to offer some words of condolence when
another man, similarly affected, got in before me,
and laying a rather unsteady hand upon the celestial
shoulder tipped back a very senile hat, and
pointing to the name on the stone remarked with
the most exact care and scrupulous accent: “Friend
of yours, perhaps; been dead long?”

There was no reply; he continued: “Very worthy
man, that Jake; knew him up in Tuolumne. Good
feller—Jake.” No response: the gentleman settled
his hat still farther back, and continued with a trifle
less exactness of speech: “I say, young wom'n, Jake
was my pard in the mines. Goo' fell'r I 'bserved!”

The last sentence was shot straight into the
celestial ear at short range. It produced no
effect. The gentleman's patience and rhetorical
vigilance were now completely exhausted. He
walked round, and planting himself defiantly in
front of the vicarious mourner, he stuck his hands
doggedly into his pockets and delivered the following
rebuke, like the desultory explosions of a bunch
of damaged fire-crackers: “It wont do, old girl;
ef Jake knowed how you's treatin' his old pard he'd
jest git up and snatch you bald headed—he would!

[figure description] Page 029.[end figure description]

You ain't no friend o' his'n and you ain't yur fur no
good—you bet! Now you jest sling your swag
an' bolt back to heav'n, or I'm hanged ef I don't
have suthin' worse'n horse-stealin' to answer fur,
this time.”

And he took a step forward. At this point I
interfered.

At Woodward's Garden, in the city of San
Francisco, is a rather badly chiselled statue of
Pandora pulling open her casket of ills. Pandora's
raiment, I grieve to state, has slipped down about
her waist in a manner exceedingly reprehensible. One
evening about twilight, I was passing that way, and
saw a long gaunt miner, evidently just down from
the mountains, and whom I had seen before, standing
rather unsteadily in front of Pandora, admiring her
shapely figure, but seemingly afraid to approach
her. Seeing me advance, he turned to me with a
queer, puzzled expression in his funny eyes, and
said with an earnestness that came near defeating
its purpose, “Good ev'n'n t'ye, stranger.” “Good
evening, sir,” I replied, after having analyzed his
salutation and extracted the sense of it. Lowering
his voice to what was intended for a whisper,
the miner, with a jerk of his thumb Pandoraward,
continued: “Stranger, d'ye hap'n t'know 'er?”

[figure description] Page 030.[end figure description]

“Certainly; that is Bridget. Pandora, a Greek
maiden, in the pay of the Board of Supervisors.”

He straightened himself up with a jerk that threatened
the integrity of his neck and made his teeth
snap, lurched heavily to the other side, oscillated
critically for a few moments, and muttered:
“Brdgtpnd—.” It was too much for him; he
went down into his pocket, fumbled feebly round,
and finally drawing out a paper of purely hypothetical
tobacco, conveyed it to his mouth and
bit off about two-thirds of it, which he masticated
with much apparent benefit to his understanding,
offering what was left to me. He then resumed
the conversation with the easy familiarity of one
who has established a claim to respectful attention:

“Pardner, couldn't ye interdooce a fel'r's wants
tknow'er?” “Impossible; I have not the honour of
her acquaintance.” A look of distrust crept into
his face, and finally settled into a savage scowl
about his eyes. “Sed ye knew'er!” he faltered,
menacingly. “So I do, but I am not upon speaking
terms with her, and—in fact she declines
to recognise me.” The soul of the honest miner
flamed out; he laid his hand threateningly upon
his pistol, jerked himself stiff, glared a moment at
me with the look of a tiger, and hurled this question
at my head as if it had been an iron interrogation
point: “W'at a' yer ben adoin' to that gurl?”

[figure description] Page 031.[end figure description]

I fled, and the last I saw of the chivalrous goldhunter,
he had his arm about Pandora's stony
waist and was endeavouring to soothe her supposed
agitation by stroking her granite head.

Our story begins with the death of our hero.
The manner of it was decapitation, the instrument
a mowing machine. A young son of the
deceased, dumb with horror, seized the paternal
head and ran with it to the house.

“There!” ejaculated the young man, bowling
the gory pate across the threshold at his mother's
feet, “look at that, will you?”

The old lady adjusted her spectacles, lifted the
dripping head into her lap, wiped the face of it with
her apron, and gazed into its fishy eyes with
tender curiosity. “John,” said she, thoughtfully,
“is this yours?”

“No, ma, it ain't none o' mine.”

“John,” continued she, with a cold, unimpassioned
earnestness, “where did you get this
thing?”

“Why, ma,” returned the hopeful, “that's
Pap's.”

“John”—and there was just a touch of severity
in her voice—“when your mother asks you a

[figure description] Page 032.[end figure description]

question you should answer that particular question.
Where did you get this?”

“Out in the medder, then, if you're so derned
pertikeller,” retorted the youngster, somewhat
piqued; “the mowin' machine lopped it off.”

The old lady rose and restored the head into the
hands of the young man. Then, straightening
with some difficulty her aged back, and assuming a
matronly dignity of bearing and feature, she
emitted the rebuke following:

“My son, the gentleman whom you hold in your
hand—any more pointed allusion to whom would
be painful to both of us—has punished you a
hundred times for meddling with things lying
about the farm. Take that head back and put it
down where you found it, or you will make your
mother very angry.”

An old man of seventy-five years lay dying.
For a lifetime he had turned a deaf ear to religion,
and steeped his soul in every current crime. He
had robbed the orphan and plundered the widow;
he had wrested from the hard hands of honest
toil the rewards of labour; had lost at the gamingtable
the wealth with which he should have endowed
churches and Sunday schools; had wasted

[figure description] Page 033.[end figure description]

in riotous living the substance of his patrimony,
and left his wife and children without bread. The
intoxicating bowl had been his god—his belly had
absorbed his entire attention. In carnal pleasures
passed his days and nights, and to the maddening
desires of his heart he had ministered without
shame and without remorse. He was a bad, bad
egg! And now this hardened iniquitor was to
meet his Maker! Feebly and hesitatingly his
breath fluttered upon his pallid lips. Weakly
trembled the pulse in his flattened veins! Wife,
children, mother-in-law, friends, who should have
hovered lovingly about his couch, cheering his last
moments and giving him medicine, he had killed
with grief, or driven widely away; and he was
now dying alone by the inadequate light of a
tallow candle, deserted by heaven and by earth. No,
not by heaven. Suddenly the door was pushed
softly open, and there entered the good minister,
whose pious counsel the suffering wretch had
in health so often derided. Solemnly the man
of God advanced, Bible in hand. Long and silently
he stood uncovered in the presence of death. Then
with cold and impressive dignity he remarked,
“Miserable old sinner!”

Old Jonas Lashworthy looked up. He sat up.
The voice of that holy man put strength into his
aged limbs, and he stood up. He was reserved

[figure description] Page 034.[end figure description]

for a better fate than to die like a neglected dog:
Mr. Lashworthy was hanged for braining a minister
of the Gospel with a boot-jack. This touching
tale has a moral.

Moral of this Touching Tale.—In snatching
a brand from the eternal burning, make sure of its
condition, and be careful how you lay hold of it.

I have a friend who was never a church member,
but was, and is, a millionaire—a generous
benevolent millionaire—who once went about
doing good by stealth, but with a natural preference
for doing it at his office. One day he took
it into his thoughtful noddle that he would like
to assist in the erection of a new church edifice,
to replace the inadequate and shabby structure
in which a certain small congregation in his town
then worshipped. So he drew up a subscription
paper, modestly headed the list with “Christian,
2000 dollars,” and started one of the Deacons about
with it. In a few days the Deacon came back to
him, like the dove to the ark, saying he had
succeeded in procuring a few names, but the press
of his private business was such that he had felt
compelled to intrust the paper to Deacon Smith.

Next day the document was presented to my

[figure description] Page 035.[end figure description]

friend, as nearly blank as when it left his hands.
Brother Smith explained that he (Smith) had
started this thing, and a brother calling himself
“Christian,” whose name he was not at liberty
to disclose, had put down 2000 dollars. Would
our friend aid them with an equal amount? Our
friend took the paper and wrote “Philanthropist,
1000 dollars,” and Brother Smith went away.

In about a week Brother Jones put in an appearance
with the subscription paper. By extraordinary
exertions Brother Jones—thinking a handsome
new church would be an ornament to the town
and increase the value of real estate—had got two
brethren, who desired to remain incog., to subscribe:
“Christian” 2000 dollars, and “Philanthropist”
1000 dollars. Would my friend kindly
help along a struggling congregation? My friend
would. He wrote “Citizen, 500 dollars,” pledging
Brother Jones, as he had pledged the others, not
to reveal his name until it was time to pay.

Some weeks afterward, a clergyman stepped into
my friend's counting-room, and after smilingly
introducing himself, produced that identical subscription
list.

“Mr. K.,” said he, “I hope you will pardon
the liberty, but I have set on foot a little scheme
to erect a new church for our congregation, and
three of the brethren have subscribed handsomely.

[figure description] Page 036.[end figure description]

Would you mind doing something to help along
the good work?”

My friend glanced over his spectacles at the
proffered paper. He rose in his wrath! He
towered! Seizing a loaded pen he dashed at that
fair sheet and scrabbled thereon in raging characters,
“Impenitent Sinner—Not one cent, by G—!”

After a brief explanatory conference, the minister
thoughtfully went his way. That struggling congregation
still worships devoutly in its original,
unpretending temple.

One glorious morning, after the great earthquake
of October 21, 1868, had with some difficulty shaken
me into my trousers and boots, I left the house.
I may as well state that I left it immediately, and
by an aperture constructed for another purpose.
Arrived in the street, I at once betook myself to
saving people. This I did by remarking closely
the occurrence of other shocks, giving the alarm
and setting an example fit to be followed. The
example was followed, but owing to the vigour with
which it was set was seldom overtaken. In passing
down Clay-street I observed an old rickety brick
boarding-house, which seemed to be just on the
point of honouring the demands of the earthquake

[figure description] Page 037.[end figure description]

upon its resources. The last shock had subsided,
but the building was slowly and composedly settling
into the ground. As the third story came down to
my level, I observed in one of the front rooms a
young and lovely female in white, standing at a
door trying to get out. She couldn't, for the door
was locked—I saw her through the key-hole. With
a single blow of my heel I opened that door, and
opened my arms at the same time.

“Thank God,” cried I, “I have arrived in time.
Come to these arms.”

The lady in white stopped, drew out an eye-glass,
placed it carefully upon her nose, and taking an
inventory of me from head to foot, replied:

“No thank you; I prefer to come to grief in
the regular way.”

While the pleasing tones of her voice were still
ringing in my ears I noticed a puff of smoke rising
from near my left toe. It came from the chimney
of that house.

Johnny is a little four-year-old, of bright,
pleasant manners, and remarkable for intelligence.
The other evening his mother took him upon her
lap, and after stroking his curly head awhile, asked
him if he knew who made him. I grieve to state
that instead of answering “Dod,” as might have

[figure description] Page 038.[end figure description]

been expected, Johnny commenced cramming his
face full of ginger-bread, and finally took a fit of
coughing that threatened the dissolution of his
frame. Having unloaded his throat and whacked
him on the back, his mother propounded the following
supplementary conundrum:

“Johnny, are you not aware that at your age
every little boy is expected to say something brilliant
in reply to my former question? How can you so
dishonour your parents as to neglect this golden
opportunity? Think again.”

The little urchin cast his eyes upon the floor and
meditated a long time. Suddenly he raised his face
and began to move his lips. There is no knowing
what he might have said, but at that moment his
mother noted the pressing necessity of wringing and
mopping his nose, which she performed with such
painful and conscientious singleness of purpose that
Johnny set up a war-whoop like that of a night-blooming
tomcat.

It may be objected that this little tale is neither
instructive nor amusing. I have never seen any
stories of bright children that were.

Mr. Goboffle had a small child, no wife, a large
dog, and a house. As he was unable to afford the

[figure description] Page 039.[end figure description]

expense of a nurse, he was accustomed to leave the
child in the care of the dog, who was much attached
to it, while absent at a distant restaurant for his
meals, taking the precaution to lock them up
together to prevent kidnapping. One day, while at
his dinner, he crowded a large, hard-boiled potato
down his neck, and it conducted him into eternity.
His clay was taken to the Coroner's, and the great
world went on, marrying and giving in marriage,
lying, cheating, and praying, as if he had never
existed.

Meantime the dog had, after several days of
neglect, forced an egress through a window, and a
neighbouring baker received a call from him daily.
Walking gravely in, he would deposit a piece of
silver, and receiving a roll and his change would
march off homeward. As this was a rather unusual
proceeding in a cur of his species, the baker one
day followed him, and as the dog leaped joyously
into the window of the deserted house, the man of
dough approached and looked in. What was his
surprise to see the dog deposit his bread calmly
upon the floor and fall to tenderly licking the face
of a beautiful child!

It is but fair to explain that there was nothing
but the face remaining. But this dog did so love
the child!

[figure description] Page 040.[end figure description]

Two little California boys were arrested at Reno
for horse thieving. They had started from Surprise
Valley with a cavalcade of thirty animals, and
disposed of them leisurely along their line of march,
until they were picked up at Reno, as above explained.
I don't feel quite easy about those
youths—away out there in Nevada without their
Testaments! Where there are no Sunday School
books boys are so apt to swear and chew tobacco
and rob sluice-boxes; and once a boy begins to do
that last he might as well sell out; he's bound to
end by doing something bad! I knew a boy once
who began by robbing sluice-boxes, and he went
right on from bad to worse, until the last I heard
of him he was in the State Legislature, elected by
Democratic votes. You never saw anybody take
on as his poor old mother did when she heard
about it.

“Hank,” said she to the boy's father, who was
forging a bank note in the chimney corner, “this
all comes o' not edgercatin' 'im when he was a
baby. Ef he'd larnt spellin' and ciferin' he never
could a-ben elected.”

It pains me to state that old Hank didn't seem
to get any thinner under the family disgrace, and

[figure description] Page 041.[end figure description]

his appetite never left him for a minute. The fact
is, the old gentleman wanted to go to the United
States Senate.

An invalid wife in Leavenworth heard her
husband make proposals of marriage to the nurse.
The dying woman arose in bed, fixed her large black
eyes for a moment upon the face of her heartless
spouse with a reproachful intensity that must haunt
him through life, and then fell back a corpse. The
remorse of that widower, as he led the blushing
nurse to the altar the next week, can be more
easily imagined than described. Such reparation as
was in his power he made. He buried the first wife
decently and very deep down, laying a handsome
and exceedingly heavy stone upon the sepulchre.
He chiselled upon the stone the following simple
and touching line: “She can't get back.”

In a lecture about girls, Cady Stanton contrasted
the buoyant spirit of young males with the dejected
sickliness of immature women. This, she says, is
because the latter are keenly sensitive to the fact
that they have no aim in life. This is a sad, sad
truth! No longer ago than last year the writer's

[figure description] Page 042.[end figure description]

youngest girl—Gloriana, a skim-milk blonde concern
of fourteen—came pensively up to her father with
big tears in her little eyes, and a forgotten morsel
of buttered bread lying unchewed in her mouth.

“Papa,” murmured the poor thing, “I'm gettin'
awful pokey, and my clothes don't seem to set well
in the back. My days are full of ungratified
longin's, and my nights don't get any better. Papa,
I think society needs turnin' inside out and
scrapin'. I haven't got nothin' to aspire to—no
aim; nor anything!”

The desolate creature spilled herself loosely into
a cane-bottom chair, and her sorrow broke “like
a great dyke broken.”

The writer lifted her tenderly upon his knee and
bit her softly on the neck.

“Gloriana,” said he, “have you chewed up all
that toffy in two days?”

A smothered sob was her frank confession.

“Now, see here, Glo,” continued the parent,
rather sternly, “don't let me hear any more about
`aspirations'—which are always adulterated with
terra alba—nor `aims'—which will give you the
gripes like anything. You just take this two shilling-piece
and invest every penny of it in lollipops!”

You should have seen the fair, bright smile
crawl from one of that innocent's ears to the other—
you should have marked that face sprinkle all

[figure description] Page 043.[end figure description]

over with dimples—you ought to have beheld the
tears of joy jump glittering into her eyes and spill
all over her father's clean shirt that he hadn't had
on more than fifteen minutes! Cady Stanton is
impotent of evil in the Grile family so long as the
price of sweets remains unchanged.

The writer remembers, as if it were but yesterday,
when he edited the Hang Tree Herald. For six
months he devoted his best talent to advocating
the construction of a railway between that place
and Jayhawk, thirty miles distant. The route
presented every inducement. There would be no
grading required, and not a single curve would be
necessary. As it lay through an uninhabited
alkali flat, the right of way could be easily obtained.
As neither terminus had other than pack-mule
communication with civilization, the rolling stock
and other material must necessarily be constructed
at Hang Tree, because the people at the other end
didn't know enough to do it, and hadn't any blacksmith.
The benefit to our place was indisputable;
it constituted the most seductive charm of the
scheme. After six months of conscientious lying,
the company was incorporated, and the first shovelful
of alkali turned up and preserved in a museum,

[figure description] Page 044.[end figure description]

when suddenly the devil put it into the head of one
of the Directors to inquire publicly what the road
was designed to carry. It is needless to say the
question was never satisfactorily answered, and the
most daring enterprise of the age was knocked perfectly
cold. That very night a deputation of stockholders
waited upon the editor of the Herald and
prescribed a change of climate. They afterward
said the change did them good.

In the season for making presents my friend
Stockdoddle Gish, Esq., thought he would so far
waive his superiority to the insignificant portion of
manking outside his own waistcoat as to follow one
of its customs. Mr. Gish has a friend—a delicate
female of the shrinking sort—whom he favours with
his esteem as a sort of equivalent for the respect she
accords him when he browbeats her. Our hero
numbers among the blessings which his merit has
extorted from niggardly Nature a gaunt meathound,
between whose head and body there exists
about the same proportion as between those of a
catfish, which he also resembles in the matter of
mouth. As to sides, this precious pup is not
dissimilar to a crockery crate loosely covered with
a wet sheet. In appetite he is liberal and

[figure description] Page 045.[end figure description]

cosmopolitan, loving a dried sheepskin as well in proportion
to its weight as a kettle of soap. The
village which Mr. Gish honours by his residence
has for some years been kept upon the dizzy verge
of financial ruin by the maintenance of this animal.

The reader will have already surmised that it was
this beast which our hero selected to testify his
toleration of his lady friend. There never was a
greater mistake. Mr. Gish merely presented her
a sheaf of assorted angle-worms, neatly bound
with a pink ribbon tied into a simple knot. The
dog is an heirloom and will descend to the Gishes
of the next generation, in the direct line of
inheritance.

About the most ludicrous incident that I remember
occurred one day in an ordinarily solemn
village in the cow-counties. A worthy matron,
who had been absent looking after a vagrom cow,
returned home, and pushing against the door found
it obstructed by some heavy substance, which, upon
examination, proved to be her husband. He had
been slaughtered by some roving joker, who had
wrought upon him with a pick-handle. To one of
his ears was pinned a scrap of greasy paper, upon
which were scrambled the following sentiments in
pencil-tracks:

[figure description] Page 046.[end figure description]

“The inqulosed boddy is that uv old Burker.
Step litely, stranger, fer yer lize the mortil part
uv wat you mus be sum da. Thers arrest for the
weery! If Burker heddenta wurkt agin me fer
Corner I wuddenta hed to sit on him. Ov setch is
the kingum of hevvun! You don't want to moov
this boddy til ime summuns to hold a ninquest. Orl
flesh are gras!”

The ridiculous part of the story is that the lady
did not wait to summon the Coroner, but took
charge of the remains herself; and in dragging
them toward the bed she exploded into her face a
shotgun, which had been cunningly contrived to
discharge by a string connected with the body.
Thus was she punished for an infraction of the
law. The next day the particulars were told
me by the facetious Coroner himself, whose jury
had just rendered a verdict of accidental drowning
in both cases. I don't know when I have enjoyed
a heartier laugh.

One summer evening, while strolling with considerable
difficulty over Russian Hill, San Francisco,
Mr. Grile espied a man standing upon the extreme
summit, with a pensive brow and a suit of clothes
which seemed to have been handed down through a

[figure description] Page 047.[end figure description]

long line of ancestors from a remote Jew peddler.
Mr. Grile respectfully saluted; a man who has any
clothes at all is to him an object of veneration.
The stranger opened the conversation:

“My son,” said he, in a tone suggestive of
strangulation by the Sheriff, “do you behold this
wonderful city, its wharves crowded with the shipping
of all nations?”

Mr. Grile beheld with amazement.

“Twenty-one years ago—alas! it used to be but
twenty,” and he wiped away a tear—“you might
have bought the whole dern thing for a Mexican
ounce.”

Mr. Grile hastened to proffer a paper of tobacco,
which disappeared like a wisp of oats drawn into a
threshing machine.

“I was one among the first who_____”

Mr. Grile hit him on the head with a pavingstone
by way of changing the topic.

“Young man,” continued he, “do you feel
this bommy breeze? There isn't a climit in the
world_____”

This melancholy relic broke down in a fit of
coughing. No sooner had he recovered than he
leaped into the air, making a frantic clutch at something,
but apparently without success.

“Dern it,” hissed he, “there goes my teeth;
blowed out again, by hokey!”

[figure description] Page 048.[end figure description]

A passing cloud of dust hid him for a moment
from view, and when he reappeared he was an
altered man; a paroxysm of asthma had doubled
him up like a nut-cracker.

“Excuse me,” he wheezed, “I'm subject to this;
caught it crossin' the Isthmus in '49. As I was
a-sayin', there's no country in the world that offers
such inducements to the immygrunt as Californy.
With her fertile soil, her unrivalled climit, her magnificent
bay, and the rest of it, there is enough for
all.”

This venerable pioneer picked a fragmentary biscuit
from the street and devoured it. Mr. Grile
thought this had gone on about long enough. He
twisted the head off that hopeful old party, surrendered
himself to the authorities, and was at once
discharged.

A pedagogue in Indiana, who was “had up” for
unmercifully waling the back of a little girl, justified
his action by explaining that “she persisted in
flinging paper pellets at him when his back was
turned.” That is no excuse. Mr. Grile once
taught school up in the mountains, and about every
half hour had to remove his coat and scrape off the
dried paper wads adhering to the nap. He never
permitted a trifle like this to unsettle his patience;

[figure description] Page 049.[end figure description]

he just kept on wearing that gaberdine until it had
no nap and the wads wouldn't stick. But when
they took to dipping them in mucilage he made a
complaint to the Board of Directors.

“Young man,” said the Chairman, “ef you don't
like our ways, you'd better sling your blankets and
git. Prentice Mulford tort skule yer for more'n
six months, and he never said a word agin the wads.”

Mr. Grile briefly explained that Mr. Mulford
might have been brought up to paper wads, and
didn't mind them.

“It ain't no use,” said another Director, “the
children hev got to be amused.”

Mr. Grile protested that there were other amusements
quite as diverting; but the third Director
here rose and remarked:

“I perfeckly agree with the Cheer; this youngster
better travel. I consider as paper wads lies
at the root uv popillar edyercation; ther a necissary
adjunck uv the skool systim. Mr. Cheerman, I
move and second that this yer skoolmarster be
shot.”

Mr. Grile did not remain to observe the result
of the voting.

A citizen of Pittsburg, aged sixty, had, by tireless
industry and the exercise of rigid economy,

[figure description] Page 050.[end figure description]

accumulated a hoard of frugal dollars, the sight and feel
whereof were to his soul a pure delight. Imagine
his sorrow and the heaviness of his aged heart
when he learned that the good wife had bestowed
thereof upon her brother bountiful largess exceeding
his merit. Sadly and prayerfully while she
slept lifted he the retributive mallet and beat in
her brittle pate. Then with the quiet dignity of one
who has redressed a grievous wrong, surrendered
himself unto the law this worthy old man. Let him
who has never known the great grief of slaughtering
a wife judge him harshly. He that is without sin
among you, let him cast the first stone—and let it
be a large heavy stone that shall grind that
wicked old man into a powder of exceeding impalpability.

“A man was sentenced to twenty years' confinement
for a deed of violence. In the excitement of
the moment his wife sought and obtained a divorce.
Thirteen years afterward he was pardoned. The
wife brought the pardon to the gate; the couple
left the spot arm in arm; and in less than an hour
they were again united in the bonds of wedlock.”

Such is the touching tale narrated by a newspaper
correspondent. It is in every respect true; I knew
the parties well, and during that long bitter period

[figure description] Page 051.[end figure description]

of thirteen years it was commonly asked concerning
the woman: “Hasn't that hag trapped anybody
yet? She'll have to take back old Jabe when he gets
out.” And she did. For nearly thirteen weary
years she struggled nobly against fate: she went
after every unmarried man in her part of the country;
but “No,” said they, “we cannot—indeed we cannot—
marry you, after the way you went back on
Jabe. It is likely that under the same circumstances
you would play us the same scurvy trick.
G'way, woman!” And so the poor old heartbroken
creature had to go to the Governor and get
the old man pardoned out. Bless her for her steadfast
fidelity!

This, therefore, is the story of her:—Some four
years ago her husband brought home a baby,
which he said he found lying in the street, and
which they concluded to adopt. About a year
after this he brought home another, and the good
woman thought she could stand that one too. A
similar period passed away, when one evening he
opened the door and fell headlong into the room,
swearing with studied correctness at a dog which
had tripped him up, but which upon inspection
turned out to be another baby. Margaret's

[figure description] Page 052.[end figure description]

suspicion was aroused, but to allay his she hastened
to implore him to adopt that darling also, to which,
after some slight hesitation, he consented. Another
twelvemonth rolled into eternity, when one evening
the lady heard a noise in the back yard, and going
out she saw her husband labouring at the windlass
of the well with unwonted industry. As the
bucket neared the top he reached down and extracted
another infant, exactly like the former ones,
and holding it up, explained to the astonished
matron: “Look at this, now; did you ever see
such a sweet young one go a-campaignin' about
the country without a lantern and a-tumblin' into
wells? There, take the poor little thing in to the
fire, and get off its wet clothes.” It suddenly
flashed across his mind that he had neglected an
obvious precaution—the clothes were not wet—and
he hastily added: “There's no tellin' what would
have become of it, a-climbin' down that rope, if I
hadn't seen it afore it got down to the water.”

Silently the good wife took that infant into the
house and disrobed it; sorrowfully she laid it alongside
its little brothers and sister; long and bitterly
she wept over the quartette; and then with one
tender look at her lord and master, smoking in
solemn silence by the fire, and resembling them
with all his might, she gathered her shawl about
her bowed shoulders and went away into the night.

[figure description] Page 053.[end figure description]

I never clearly knew why I visited the old cemetery
that night. Perhaps it was to see how the
work of removing the bodies was getting on, for they
were all being taken up and carted away to a more
comfortable place where land was less valuable.
It was well enough; nobody had buried himself
there for years, and the skeletons that were now
exposed were old mouldy affairs for which it was difficult
to feel any respect. However, I put a few
bones in my pocket as souvenirs. The night was
one of those black, gusty ones in March, with great
inky clouds driving rapidly across the sky, spilling
down sudden showers of rain which as suddenly
would cease. I could barely see my way between
the empty graves, and in blundering about among
the coffins I tripped and fell headlong. A peculiar
laugh at my side caused me to turn my head, and
I saw a singular old gentleman whom I had often
noticed hanging about the Coroner's office, sitting
cross-legged upon a prostrate tombstone.

“How are you, sir?” said I, rising awkwardly to
my feet; “nice night.”

“Get off my tail,” answered the elderly party,
without moving a muscle.

“My eccentric friend,” rejoined I, mockingly,

[figure description] Page 054.[end figure description]

“may I be permitted to inquire your street and
number?”

“Certainly,” he replied, “No. 1, Marle Place,
Asphalt Avenue, Hades.”

“The devil!” sneered I.

“Exactly,” said he; “oblige me by getting off
my tail.”

I was a little staggered, and by way of rallying
my somewhat dazed faculties, offered a cigar:
“Smoke?”

“Thank you,” said the singular old gentleman,
putting it under his coat; “after dinner. Drink?”

I was not exactly prepared for this, but did not
know if it would be safe to decline, and so putting
the proffered flask to my lips pretended to swig
elaborately, keeping my mouth tightly closed the
while. “Good article,” said I, returning it. He
simply remarked, “You're a fool,” and emptied the
bottle at a gulp.

“And now,” resumed he, “you will confer a
favour I shall highly appreciate by removing your
feet from my tail.”

There was a slight shock of earthquake, and all
the skeletons in sight arose to their feet, stretched
themselves and yawned audibly. Without moving
from his seat, the old gentleman rapped the nearest
one across the skull with his gold-headed cane, and
they all curled away to sleep again.

[figure description] Page 055.[end figure description]

“Sire,” I resumed, “indulge me in the impertinence
of inquiring your business here at this
hour.”

“My business is none of yours,” retorted he,
calmly; “what are you up to yourself?”

“I have been picking up some bones,” I replied,
carelessly.

“Then you are—”

“I am—”

“A Ghoul!”

“My good friend, you do me injustice. You
have doubtless read very frequently in the newspapers
of the Fiend in Human Shape whose
actions and way of life are so generally denounced.
Sire, you see before you that maligned party!”

There was a quick jerk under the soles of my
feet, which pitched me prone upon the ground.
Scrambling up, I saw the old gentleman vanishing
behind an adjacent sandhill as if the devil were
after him.

The hotel was in flames. Mr. Pokeweed was
promptly on hand, and tore madly into the burning
pile, whence he soon emerged with a nude female.
Depositing her tenderly upon a pile of hot bricks, he
mopped his steaming front with his warm coat-tail.

[figure description] Page 056.[end figure description]

“Now, Mrs. Pokeweed,” said he, “where will I
be most likely to find the children? They will
naturally wish to get out.”

The lady assumed a stiffly vertical attitude,
and with freezing dignity replied in the words
following:

“Sir, you have saved my life; I presume you
are entitled to my thanks. If you are likewise
solicitous regarding the fate of the person you
have mentioned, you had better go back and
prospect round till you find her; she would probably
be delighted to see you. But while I have
a character to maintain unsullied, you shall not
stand there and call me Mrs. Pokeweed!”

Just then the front wall toppled outward, and
Pokeweed cleared the street at a single bound.
He never learned what became of the strange lady,
and to the day of his death he professed an indifference
that was simply brutal.

Early one evening in the autumn of '64, a pale
girl stood singing Methodist hymns at the summit
of Bush Street hill. She was attired, Spanish
fashion, in a loose overcoat and slippers. Suddenly
she broke off her song, a dark-browed young soldier
from the Presidio cautiously approached, and seizing

[figure description] Page 057.[end figure description]

her fondly in his arms, snatched away the overcoat,
retreating with it to an auction-house on Pacific
Street, where it may still be seen by the benighted
traveller, just a-going for two-and-half—and never
gone!

The poor maiden after this misfortune felt a
bitter resentment swelling in her heart, and scorning
to remain among her kind in that costume,
took her way to the Cliff House, where she arrived,
worn and weary, about breakfast-time.

The landlord received her kindly, and offered her
a pair of his best trousers; but she was of noble
blood, and having been reared in luxury, respectfully
declined to receive charity from a low-born stranger.
All efforts to induce her to eat were equally unavailing.
She would stand for hours on the rocks where
the road descends to the beach, and gaze at the
playful seals in the surf below, who seemed rather
flattered by her attention, and would swim about,
singing their sweetest songs to her alone. Passersby
were equally curious as to her, but a broken
lyre gives forth no music, and her heart responded
not with any more long metre hymns.

After a few weeks of this solitary life she was
suddenly missed. At the same time a strange seal
was noted among the rest. She was remarkable
for being always clad in an overcoat, which she had
doubtless fished up from the wreck of the French

[figure description] Page 058.[end figure description]

galleon Brignardello, which went ashore there some
years afterward.

One tempestuous night, an old hag who had long
done business as a hermitess on Helmet Rock came
into the bar-room at the Cliff House, and there,
amidst the crushing thunders and lightnings spilling
all over the horizon, she related that she had
seen a young seal in a comfortable overcoat, sitting
pensively upon the pinnacle of Seal Rock, and had
distinctly heard the familiar words of a Methodist
hymn. Upon inquiry the tale was discovered to be
founded upon fact. The identity of this seal could
no longer be denied without downright blasphemy,
and in all the old chronicles of that period not a
doubt is even implied.

One day a handsome, dark, young lieutenant of
infantry, Don Edmundo by name, came out to the
Cliff House to celebrate his recent promotion.
While standing upon the verge of the cliff, with
his friends all about him, Lady Celia, as visitors
had christened her, came swimming below him, and
taking off her overcoat, laid it upon a rock. She
then turned up her eyes and sang a Methodist hymn.

No sooner did the brave Don Edmundo hear it
than he tore off his gorgeous clothes, and cast himself
headlong in the billows. Lady Celia caught
him dexterously by the waist in her mouth, and,
swimming to the outer rock, sat up and softly bit
him in halves. She then laid the pieces tenderly

[figure description] Page 059.[end figure description]

in a conspicuous place, put on her overcoat, and
plunging into the waters was never seen more.

Many are the wild fabrications of the poets
about her subsequent career, but to this day
nothing authentic has turned up. For some months
strenuous efforts were made to recover the wicked
Lieutenant's body. Every appliance which genius
could invent and skill could wield was put in requisition;
until one night the landlord, fearing
these constant efforts might frighten away the
seals, had the remains quietly removed and secretly
interred.

One day in '49 an honest miner up in Calaveras
county, California, bit himself with a small snake
of the garter variety, and either as a possible antidote,
or with a determination to enjoy the brief
remnant of a wasted life, applied a brimming jug
of whisky to his lips, and kept it there until, like a
repleted leech, it fell off.

The man fell off likewise.

The next day, while the body lay in state upon
a pine slab, and the bereaved partner of the
deceased was unbending in a game of seven-up
with a friendly Chinaman, the game was interrupted
by a familiar voice which seemed to proceed from
the jaws of the corpse: “I say—Jim!”

[figure description] Page 060.[end figure description]

Bereaved partner played the king of spades,
claimed “high,” and then, looking over his
shoulder at the melancholy remains, replied, “Well,
what is it, Dave? I'm busy.”

“I say—Jim!” repeated the corpse in the same
measured tone.

With a look of intense annoyance, and muttering
something about “people that could never stop
dead more'n a minute,” the bereaved partner rose
and stood over the body with his cards in his hand.

“Jim,” continued the mighty dead, “how fur's
this thing gone?”

“I've paid the Chinaman two-and-a-half to dig
the grave,” responded the bereaved.

“Did he strike anything?”

The Chinaman looked up: “Me strikee pay
dirt; me no bury dead 'Melican in 'em grave. Me
keep 'em claim.”

The corpse sat up erect: “Jim, git my revolver
and chase that pig-tail off. Jump his dam
sepulchre, and tax his camp five dollars each fer
prospectin' on the public domain. These Mungolyun
hordes hez got to be got under. And—I say—
Jim! 'f any more serpents come foolin' round
here drive 'em off. 'T'aint right to be bitin' a
feller when whisky's two dollars a gallon. Dern
all foreigners, anyhow!”

And the mortal part pulled on its boots.

TALL TALK.

[figure description] Page 061.[end figure description]

When the starving peasantry of France were
bearing with inimitable fortitude their great
bereavement in the death of Louis le Grand, how
cheerfully must they have bowed their necks to
the easy yoke of Philip of Orleans, who set them
an example in eating which he had not the slightest
objection to their following. A monarch skilled
in the mysteries of the cuisine must wield the sceptre
all the more gently from his schooling in handling
the ladle. In royalty, the delicate manipulation
of an omelette soufflé is at once an evidence of
genius, and an assurance of a tender forbearance
in state policy. All good rulers have been good
livers, and if all bad ones have been the same
this merely proves that even the worst of men have
still something divine in them.

There is more in a good dinner than is disclosed
by the removal of the covers. Where the eye of
hunger perceives but a juicy roast, the eye of faith
detects a smoking God. A well-cooked joint is

[figure description] Page 062.[end figure description]

redolent of religion, and a delicate pasty is crisp
with charity. The man who can light his afterdinner
Havana without feeling full to the neck
with all the cardinal virtues is either steeped in
iniquity or has dined badly. In either case he is
no true man. We stoutly contend that that worthy
personage Epicurus has been shamefully misrepresented
by abstemious, and hence envious and mendacious,
historians. Either his philosophy was the
most gentle, genial, and reverential of antique systems,
or he was not an Epicurean, and to call him
so is a deceitful flattery. We hold that it is morally
impossible for a man to dine daily upon the fat of
the land in courses, and yet deny a future state of
existence, beatific with beef, and ecstatic with all
edibles. Another falsity of history is that of
Heliogabalus—was it not?—dining off nightingales'
tongues. No true gourmet would ever send this
warbler to the shambles so long as scarcer birds
might be obtained.

It is a fine natural instinct that teaches the
hungry and cadaverous to avoid the temples of
religion, and a short-sighted and misdirected zeal
that would gather them into the sanctuary. Religion
is for the oleaginous, the fat-bellied, chylesaturated
devotees of the table. Unless the
stomach be lined with good things, the parson may
say as many as he likes and his truths shall not be

[figure description] Page 063.[end figure description]

swallowed nor his wisdom inly digested. Probably
the highest, ripest, and most acceptable form of
worship is that performed with a knife and fork;
and whosoever on the resurrection morning can
produce from amongst the lumber of his cast-off
flesh a thin-coated and elastic stomach, showing
evidences of daily stretchings done in the body,
will find it his readiest passport and best credential.
We believe that God will not hold him
guiltless who eats with his knife, but if the deadly
steel be always well laden with toothsome morsels,
divine justice will be tempered with mercy to that
man's soul. When the author of the “Lost Tales”
represented Sisyphus as capturing his guest, the
King of Terrors, and stuffing the old glutton with
meat and drink until he became “a jolly, rubicund,
tun-bellied Death,” he gave us a tale which needs
no hœc fabula docet to point out the moral.

We verily believe that Shakspeare writ down
Fat Jack at his last gasp, as babbling, not o' green
fields, but o' green turtle, and that that starvling
Colley Cibber altered the text from sheer envy at a
good man's death. To die well we must live well,
is a familiar platitude. Morality is, of course, best
promoted by the good quality of our fare, but
quantitative excellence is by no means to be despised.
Cœteris paribus, the man who eats much is
a better Christian than the man who eats little, and

[figure description] Page 064.[end figure description]

he who eats little will pursue a more uninterrupted
course of benevolence than he who eats nothing.

Did it ever strike you, dear reader, that it must
be a particularly pleasant thing to be dead? To
say nothing hackneyed about the blessed freedom
from the cares and vexations of life—which we cling
to with such tenacity while we can, and which, when
we have no longer the power to hold, we let go all
at once, with probably a feeling of exquisite relief—
and to take no account of this latter probable but
totally undemonstrable felicity, it must be what
boys call awfully jolly to be dead.

Here you are, lying comfortably upon your back—
what is left of it—in the cool dark, and with the smell
of the fresh earth all about you. Your soul goes
knocking about amongst an infinity of shadowy
things, Lord knows where, making all sorts of silent
discoveries in the gloom of what was yesterday an
unknown and mysterious future, and which, after
centuries of exploration, must still be strangely
unfamiliar. The nomadic thing doubtless comes back
occasionally to the old grave—if the body is so fortunate
as to possess one—and looks down upon it with
big round eyes and a lingering tenderness.

It is hard to conceive a soul entirely cut loose from

[figure description] Page 065.[end figure description]

the old bones, and roving rudderless about eternity.
It was probably this inability to mentally divorce soul
from substance that gave us that absurdly satisfactory
belief in the resurrection of the flesh. There is
said to be a race of people somewhere in Africa who
believe in the immortality of the body, but deny the
resurrection of the soul. The dead will rise refreshed
after their long sleep, and in their anxiety to test
their rejuvenated powers, will skip bodily away and
forget their souls. Upon returning to look for
them, they will find nothing but little blue flames,
which can never be extinguished, but may be
carried about and used for cooking purposes. This
belief probably originates in some dim perception
of the law of compensation. In this life the body
is the drudge of the spirit; in the next the situation
is reversed.

The heaven of the Mussulman is not incompatible
with this kind of immortality. Its delights,
being merely carnal ones, could be as well or
better enjoyed without a soul, and the latter
might be booked for the Christian heaven, with
only just enough of the body to attach a pair of
wings to. Mr. Solyman Muley Abdul Ben Gazel
could thus enjoy a dual immortality and secure a
double portion of eternal felicity at no expense to
anybody.

In fact, there can be no doubt whatever that

[figure description] Page 066.[end figure description]

this theory of a double heaven is the true one,
and needs but to be fairly stated to be universally
received, inasmuch as it supposes the maximum of
felicity for terrestrial good behaviour. It is therefore
a sensible theory, resting upon quite as solid a
foundation of fact as any other theory, and must
commend itself at once to the proverbial good sense
of Christians everywhere. The trouble is that some
architectural scoundrel of a priest is likely to build
a religion upon it; and what the world needs is
theory—good, solid, nourishing theory.

One cheerful evidence of the decivilization of
the Anglo-Saxon race is the late tendency to return
to first principles in art, as manifested in substituting
noise for music. Herein we detect symptoms
of a rapid relapse into original barbarism. The
savage who beats his gong or kettledrum until his
face is of a delicate blue, and his eyes assert themselves
like those of an unterrified snail, believes
that musical skill is a mere question of brawn—a
matter of muscle. If not wholly ignorant of
technical gymnastics, he has a theory that a deftness
at dumb-bells is a prime requisite in a finished
artist. The advance—in a circle—of civilization
has only partially unsettled this belief in the human

[figure description] Page 067.[end figure description]

mind, and we are constantly though unconsciously
reverting to it.

It is true the modern demand for a great
deal of music has outstripped the supply of
muscle for its production; but the ingenuity of man
has partially made up for his lack of physical
strength, and the sublimer harmonies may still be
rendered with tolerable effectiveness, and with little
actual fatigue to the artist. As we retrograde
towards the condition of Primeval Man—the man
with the gong and kettledrum—the blacksmith
slowly reasserts his place as the interpreter of the
maestro.

But there is a limit beyond which muscle,
whether that of the arm or cheek, can no
further go, without too great an expenditure of
force in proportion to the volume of noise attainable.
And right here the splendid triumphs of
modern invention and discovery are made manifest;
electricity and gunpowder come to the relief of puny
muscle, simple appliance, and orchestras limited by
sparse population. Batteries of artillery thunder
exultingly our victory over Primeval Man, beaten
at his own game—signally routed and put to shame,
pounding his impotent gong and punishing his
ridiculous kettledrum in frantic silence, amidst
the clash and clang and roar of modern art.

[figure description] Page 068.[end figure description]

Why is he? Why defaces he the fair page of
creation, and why is he to be continued? This
has never been explained; it is one of those dispensations
of Providence the design whereof is wrapped
in profoundest obscurity. The good young man is
perhaps not without excuse for his existence, but
society is without excuse for permitting it. At his
time of life to be “good” is to insult humanity.
Goodness is proper to the aged; it is their sole
glory; why should this milky stripling bring it into
disrepute? Why should he be permitted to defile
with the fat of his sleek locks a crown intended to
adorn the grizzled pow of his elders?

A young man may be manly, gentle, honourable,
noble, tender and true, and nobody will ever think of
calling him a good young man. Your good young
man is commonly a sneak, and is very nearly allied
to that other social pest, the “nice young lady.”
As applied to the immature male of our kind, the
adjective “good” seems to have been perverted
from its original and ordinary signification, and to
have acquired a dyslogistic one. It is a term of
reproach, and means, as nearly as may be,
“characterless.” That any one should submit to

[figure description] Page 069.[end figure description]

have it applied to him is proof of the essential
cowardice of Virtue.

We believe the direst ill afflicting civilization is
the good young man. The next direst is his
natural and appointed mate, the nice young lady.
If the two might be tied neck and heels together
and flung into the sea, the land would be the fatter
for it.

Our objection to him is not that he is senseless;
this—as it concerns us not—we can patiently
endure. Nor that he is bigoted; this we expect,
and have become accustomed to. Nor that he is
small-souled, narrow, and hypocritical; all these
qualities become him well, sitting easily and gracefully
upon him. We protest against him because
he is always “carrying on.”

To carry on, in one way or another, seems to
be the function of his existence, and essential
to his health. When he is not doing it in the
pulpit he is at it in the newspapers; when both
fail him he resorts to the social circle, the church
meeting, the Sunday-school, or even the street
corner. We have known him to disport for half a
day upon the kerb-stone, carrying on with all his
might to whomsoever would endure it.

No sooner does a young sick-faced theologue get

[figure description] Page 070.[end figure description]

safely through his ordination, as a baby finishes
teething, than straightway he casts about him for
an opportunity to carry on. A pretext is soon
found, and he goes at it hammer and tongs; and
forty years after you shall find him at the same
trick with as simple a faith, as exalted an expectration,
as vigorous an impotence, as the day he began.

His carryings-on are as diverse in kind, as comprehensive
in scope, as those of the most versatile
negro minstrel. He cuts as many capers in a lifetime
as there are stars in heaven or grains of sand in
a barrel of sugar. Everything is fish that comes
to his net. If a discovery in science is announced,
he will execute you an antic upon it before it gets
fairly cold. Is a new theory advanced—ten to one
while you are trying to get it through your head
he will stand on his own and make mouths at it.
A great invention provokes him into a whirlwind
of flip-flaps absolutely bewildering to the secular
eye; while at any exceptional phenomenon of nature,
such as an earthquake, he will project himself froglike
into an infinity of lofty gymnastic absurdities.

In short, the slightest agitation of the intellectual
atmosphere sets your average parson into a tempest
of pumping like the jointed ligneous youth attached
to the eccentric of a boys whirligig. His philosophy
of life may be boiled down into a single sentence:
Carry on and you will be happy.

[figure description] Page 071.[end figure description]

There is no doubt of it. The unwelcome truth
has long been suppressed by interested parties who
find their account in playing sycophant to that self-satisfied
tyrant Modern Man; but to the impartial
philosopher it is as plain as the nose upon an
elephant's face that our ancestors ate one
another. The custom of the Fiji Islanders,
which is their only stock-in-trade, their only
claim to notoriety, is a relic of barbarism; but
it is a relic of our barbarism.

Man is naturally a carnivorous animal. This
none but greengrocers will dispute. That he was
formerly less vegetarian in his diet than at present,
is clear from the fact that market-gardening
increases in the ratio of civilization. So we
may safely assume that at some remote period Man
subsisted upon an exclusively flesh diet. Our
uniform vanity has given us the human mind as
the ne plus ultra of intelligence, the human face
and figure as the standard of beauty. Of course
we cannot deny to human fat and lean an equal
superiority over beef, mutton, and pork. It is
plain that our meat-eating ancestors would think
in this way, and, being unrestrained by the mawkish
sentiment attendant upon high civilization, would

[figure description] Page 072.[end figure description]

act habitually upon the obvious suggestion. À priori,
therefore, it is clear that we ate ourselves.

Philology is about the only thread which connects
us with the prehistoric past. By picking up and
piecing out the scattered remnants of language, we
form a patchwork of wondrous design. Oblige us
by considering the derivation of the word “sarcophagus,”
and see if it be not suggestive of potted
meats. Observe the significance of the phrase
“sweet sixteen.” What a world of meaning lurks
in the expression “she is sweet as a peach,” and
how suggestive of luncheon are the words “tender
youth.” A kiss itself is but a modified bite, and
when a young girl insists upon making a “strawberry
mark” upon the back of your hand, she only
gives way to an instinct she has not yet learned to
control. The fond mother, when she says her babe
is almost “good enough to eat,” merely shows that
she herself is only a trifle too good to eat it.

These evidences might be multiplied ad infinitum;
but if enough has been said to induce one human
being to revert to the diet of his ancestors, the
object of this essay is accomplished.

If there is any individual who combines within
himself the vices of an entire species it is he. A

[figure description] Page 073.[end figure description]

mother-in-law has usually been thought a rather
satisfactory specimen of total depravity; it has
been customary to regard your sweetheart's brother
as tolerably vicious for a young man; there is
excellent authority for looking upon your business
partner as not wholly without merit as a nuisance—
but your friend's friend is as far ahead of these
in all that constitutes a healthy disagreeableness as
they themselves are in advance of the average
reptile or the conventional pestilence.

We do not propose to illustrate the great truth
we have in hand by instances; the experience of the
reader will furnish ample evidence in support of our
proposition, and any narration of pertinent facts
could only quicken into life the dead ghosts of a
thousand sheeted annoyances to squeak and gibber
through a memory studded thick with the tombstones
of happy hours murdered by your friend's
friend.

Also, the animal is too well known to need a
description. Imagine a thing in all essential particulars
the exact reverse of a desirable acquaintance,
and you have his mental photograph. How your
friend could ever admire so hopeless and unendurable
a bore is a problem you are ever seeking to
solve. Perhaps you may be assisted in it by a
previous solution of the kindred problem—how he
could ever feel affection for yourself? Perhaps

[figure description] Page 074.[end figure description]

your friend's friend is equally exercised over that
question. Perhaps from his point of view you are
your friend's friend.

If it be that ridicule is the test of truth, as
Shaftesbury is reported to have said and didn't, the
doctrine of Woman Suffrage is the truest of all
faiths. The amount of really good ridicule that
has been expended upon this thing is appalling, and
yet we are compelled to confess that to all appearance
“the cause” has been thereby shorn of no
material strength, nor bled of its vitality. And
shall it be admitted that this potent argument of
little minds is as powerless as the dullards of all
ages have steadfastly maintained? Forbid it,
Heaven! the gimlet is as proper a gimlet as any
in all Christendom, but the timber is too hard to
pierce! Grant ye that “the movement” is waxing
more wondrous with each springing sun, who shall
say what it might not have been but for the sharp
hatcheting of us wits among its boughs? If the
doctor have not cured his patient by to-morrow he
may at least claim that without the physic the man
would have died to-day.

And pray who shall search the vitals of a whale
with a bodkin—who may reach his jackknife

[figure description] Page 075.[end figure description]

through the superposed bubber? Pachyderm, thy
name is Woman! All the king's horses and all
the king's men shall not bend the bow that can
despatch a clothyard shaft through thy pearly hide.
The male and female women who nightly howl
their social and political grievances into the
wide ear of the universe are as insensible to the
prickings of ridicule as they are unconscious of
logic. An intellectual Goliah of Gath might spear
them with an epigram like unto a weaver's beam,
and the sting thereof would be as but the nipping of
a red ant. Apollo might speed among them his
silver arrows, which erst heaped the Phrygian
shores with hecatombs of Argive slain, and they
would but complain of the mosquito's beak.
Your female reformer goes smashing through
society like a tipsy rhinoceros among the tulip
beds, and all the torrent of brickbats rained upon
her skin is shed, as globules of mercury might be
supposed to run off the back of a dry drake.

One of the rarest amusements in life is to go about
with an icicle suspended by a string, letting it down
the necks of the unwary. The sudden shrug, the
quick frightened shudder, the yelp of apprehension,
are sources of a pure, because diabolical, delight. But
these women—you may practise your chilling joke
upon one of them, and she will calmly wonder where
you got your ice, and will pen with deliberate fingers

[figure description] Page 076.[end figure description]

an ungrammatical resolution denouncing congelation
as tyrannical and obsolete.

We despair of ever dispelling these creatures by
pungent pleasantries—of routing them by sharp
censure. They are, apparently, to go on practically
unmolested to the end. Meantime we are cast
down with a mighty proneness along the dust; our
shapely anatomy is clothed in a jaunty suit of
sackcloth liberally embellished with the frippery
of ashes; our days are vocal with wailing, our
nights melodious with snuffle!

Brethren, let us pray that the political sceptre
may not pass from us into the jewelled hands
which were intended by nature for the clouting of
babes and sucklings.

When abandoned to her own devices, the average
female has a tendency to “put on her things,” and
to contrive the same, in a manner that is not conducive
to patience in the male beholder. Her
besetting iniquity in this particular is a fondness for
angles, and she is unwavering in her determination
to achieve them at whatever cost.

Now we vehemently affirm that in woman's apparel
an angle is an offence to the male eye, and therefore
a crime of no small magnitude. In the masculine

[figure description] Page 077.[end figure description]

garb angles are tolerable—angles of whatever
acuteness. The masculine character and life are
rigid and angular, and the apparel should, or at
least may, proclaim the man. But with the soft,
rounded nature of woman, her bending flexibility of
temper, angles are absolutely incompatible. In
her outward seeming all should be easy and flowing—
every fold a nest of graces, and every line a
curve.

By close attention to this great truth, and a
conscientious striving after its advantages, woman
may hope to become rather comely of exterior, and
to find considerable favour in the eyes of man. It
is not impossible that, without any abatement of her
present usefulness, she may come to be regarded as
actually ornamental, and even attractive. If with
her angles she will also renounce some hundreds of
other equally harassing absurdities of attire, she
may consider her position assured, and her claim
to masculine toleration reasonably well grounded.

It would be profitable in the end if man would
take a hint from his lack of wings, and settle down
comfortably into the assurance that midair is not
his appointed element. The confession is a humiliating
one, but there is a temperate balm in

[figure description] Page 078.[end figure description]

the consciousness that his inability to “shave with
level wing” the blue empyrean cannot justly be
charged upon himself. He has done his endeavour,
and done it nobly; but he'll break his precious
neck.

In Goldsmith's veracious “History of Animated
Nature” is a sprightly account of one Nicolas,
who was called, if our memory be not at fault, the
man-fish, and who was endowed by his Creator—
the late Mr. Goldsmith aforesaid—with the power of
conducting an active existence under the sea. That
equally veracious and instructive work “The Arabian
Night's Entertainments,” peoples the bottom
of old ocean with powerful nations of similarly
gifted persons; while in our own day “the Man-Frog”
has taught us what may be done in this line
when one has once got the knack of it.

Some years since (we do not know if he has yet
suffered martyrdom at the hand of the fiendish
White) there lived a noted Indian chieftain whose
name, being translated, signifies “The-Man-Who-Walks-Under-the-Ground,”
probably a lineal descendant
of the gnomes. We have ourselves walked
under the ground in wine cellars.

With these notable examples in mind, we are not
prepared to assert that, though man has as a rule
neither the gills of a fish nor the nose of a mole,
he may not enjoy a drive at the bottom of the sea,

[figure description] Page 079.[end figure description]

or a morning ramble under the subsoil. But with
the exception of Peter Wilkins' Flying Islanders—
whose existence we vehemently dispute—and some
similar creatures whom it suits our purpose to
ignore, there is no record of any person to whom
the name of The-Man-Who-Flies-Over-the-Hills
may be justly applied. We make no account
of the shallow device of Mongolfier, not the
dubious contrivance of Marriott. A gentleman of
proper aspirations would scorn to employ either, as
the Man-Frog would reject a diving-bell, or the
subterranean chieftain would sneer at the Mont
Cenis tunnel. These “weak inventions” only
emphasize our impotence to strive with the subtle
element about and above. They prove nothing so
conclusively as that we can't fly—a fact still more
strikingly proven by the constant thud of people
tumbling out of them. To a Titan of comprehensive
ear, who could catch the noises of a world
upon his single tympanum as Hector caught Argive
javelins upon his shield, the patter of dropping
aëronauts would sound like the gentle pleting
of hailstones upon a dusty highway—so thick and
fast they fall.

It is probable that man is no more eager to float
free into space than the earth—if it be sentient—
is to shake him off; but it would appear that
he and it must, like the Siamese twins, consent to

[figure description] Page 080.[end figure description]

endure the disadvantages of a mutually disagreeable
intimacy. We submit that it is hardly worth his
while to continue “larding the lean earth” with
his carcase in the vain endeavour to emulate angels,
whom in no respect he at all resembles.

The motto aut Cœsar aut nullus is principally
nonsense, we take it. If one may not be a man,
one may, in most cases, be a hog with equal satisfaction
to his mind and heart.

There is Thompson Washington Smith, for example
(his name is not Thompson, nor Washington,
nor yet Smith; we call him so to conceal his real
name, which is perhaps Smythe). Now Thompson,
there is reason to believe, tried earnestly for some
years to be a man. Alas! he began while he was a
boy, and got exhausted before he arrived at maturity.
He could make no further effort, and manhood is
not acquired without a mighty struggle, nor mantained
without untiring industry. So having
fatigued himself before reaching the starting-point,
Thompson Washington did not re-enter the race
for manhood, but contented his simple soul with
achieving a modest swinehood. He became a hog
of considerable talent and promise.

Let it not be supposed that Thompson has

[figure description] Page 081.[end figure description]

anything in common with the typical, ideal hog—him
who encrusts his hide with clay, and inhumes his
muzzle in garbage. Far from it; he is a cleanly—
almost a godly—hog, preternaturally fair of exterior,
and eke fastidious of appetite. He is glossy of coat,
stainless of shirt, immaculate of trousers. He is
shiny of beaver and refulgent of boot. With all,
a Hog. Watch him ten minutes under any circumstances
and his face shall seem to lengthen
and sharpen away, split at the point, and develop
an unmistakeable snout. A ridge of bristles will
struggle for sunlight under the gloss of his coat.
This is your imagination, and that is about as far
as it will take you. So long as Thompson Washington,
actual, maintains a vertical attitude,
Thompson Washington, unreal, will not assume an
horizontal one. Your fancy cannot “go the whole
hog.”

It only remains to state explicitly to whom we
are alluding. Well, there is a stye in the soul
of every one of us, in which abides a porker more
or less objectionable. We don't all let him range
at large, like Smith, but he will occasionally exalt
his visage above the rails of even the most cleverly
constructed pen. The best of us are they who
spend most time repressing the beast by rapping
him upon the nose.

[figure description] Page 082.[end figure description]

We are prepared, not perhaps to prove, but to
maintain, that civilization would be materially aided
and abetted by the offer of a liberal reward for the
scalps of Young Persons with the ears attached.
Your regular Young Person is a living nuisance,
whose every act is a provocation to exterminate her.
We say “her,” not because, physically considered,
the Y. P. is necesarily of the she sex; more commonly
is it an irreclaimable male; but morally and
intellectually it is an unmixed female. Her virtues
are merely milk-and-morality—her intelligence is
pure spiritual whey. Her conversation (to which
not even her own virtues and intelligence are in any
way related) is three parts rain-water that has stood
too long and one part cider that has not stood long
enough—a sickening, sweetish compound, one dose
of which induces in the mental stomach a colicky
qualm, followed, if no correctives be taken, by violent
retching, coma, and death.

The Young Person vegetates best in the atmosphere
of parlours and ball-rooms; if she infested
the fields and roadsides like the squirrels, lizards,
and mud-hens, she would be as ruthlessly exterminated
as they. Every passing sportsman would
fill her with duck-shot, and every strolling

[figure description] Page 083.[end figure description]

gentleman would step out of his way to smite off her
head with his cane, as one decapitates a thistle.
But in the drawing-room one lays off his destructiveness
with his hat and gloves, and the Young
Person enjoys the same immunity that a sleepy
mastiff grants to the worthless kitten campaigning
against his nose.

But there is no good reason why the Spider
should be destroyed and the Young Person tolerated.

The world makes few graver mistakes than in
supposing a man must necessarily possess all the
cardinal virtues because he has a big dog and some
dirty children.

We know a butcher whose children are not
merely dirty—they are fearfully and wonderfully
besmirched by the hand of an artist. He has,
in addition, a big dog with a tendency to dropsy,
who flies at you across the street with such celerity
that he outruns his bark by a full second, and you
are warned of your danger only after his teeth are
buried in your leg. And yet the owner of these
children and father of this dog is no whit better, to
all appearance, than a baker who has clean brats
and a mild poodle. He is not even a good butcher;
he hacks a rib and lacerates a sirloin. He talks

[figure description] Page 084.[end figure description]

through his nose, which turns up to such an extent
that the voice passes right over your head, and you
have to get on a table to tell whether he is slandering
his dead wife or swearing at yourself.

If that man possessed a thousand young ones,
exaltedly nasty, and dogs enough to make a subAtlantic
cable of German sausage, you would find it
difficult to make us believe in him. In fact, we
look upon the big dog test of morality as a venerable
mistake—natural but erroneous; and we regard
dirty children as indispensable in no other sense
than that they are inevitable.

There shall be joy in the household of the
country editor what time the rural mind shall no
longer crave the unhealthy stimuli afforded by fascinating
accounts of corpulent beets, bloated pumpkins,
dropsical melons, aspiring maize, and precocious
cabbages. Then the bucolic journalist shall have
surcease of toil, and may go out upon the meads to
frisk with kindred lambs, frolic familiarly with loosejointed
colts, and exchange grave gambollings with
solemn cows. Then shall the voice of the press, no
longer attuned to the praises of the vegetable kingdom,
find a more humble, but not less useful, employment
in calling the animal kingdom to the
evening meal beneath the sanctum window.

[figure description] Page 085.[end figure description]

To the over-worked editor life will have a fresh zest
and a new significance. The hills shall hump more
greenly upward to a bluer sky, the fields blush with
a more tender sunshine. He will go forth at dawn
with countless flipflaps of gymnastic joy; and when
the white sun shall redden with the blood of dying
day, and the hogs shall set up a fine evening hymn
of supplication to the Giver of Swill, he will stand
upon the editorial head, blissfully conscious that
his intellect is a-ripening for the morrow's work.

The rural newspaper! We sit with it in hand,
running our fingers over the big staring letters, as
over the black and white keys of a piano, drumming
out of them a mild melody of perfect repose.
With what delight do we disport us in the illimitable
void of its nothingness, as who should swim in
air! Here is nothing to startle—nothing to wound.
The very atmosphere is saturated with “the spirit
of the rural press;” and even our dog stands by,
with pendant tail, slowly dropping the lids over his
great eyes; and then, jerking them suddenly up
again, tries to look as if he were not sleepy in the
least. A pleasant smell of ploughed ground comes
strong upon us. The tinkle of ghostly cow-bells
falls drowsily upon the ear. Airy figures of phenomenal
esculents float dreamily before our half-shut
eyes, and vanish ere perfect vision can catch them.
About and above are the drone of bees, and

[figure description] Page 086.[end figure description]

the muffled thunder of milk streams shooting into
the foaming pail. The gabble of distant geese is
faintly marked off by the bark of a distant dog.
The city with its noises sinks away from our feet as
from one in a balloon, and our senses are steeped
in country languor. We slumber.

God bless the man who first invented the country
newspaper!—though Sancho Panza blessed him
once before.

Your famishing beggar is a fish of as sorry
aspect as may readily be scared up. Generally
speaking, he is repulsive as to hat, abhorrent as to
vesture, squalid of boot, and in tout ensemble unseemly
and atrocious. His appeal for alms falls not more
vexingly upon the ear than his offensive personality
smites hard upon the eye. The touching effectiveness
of his tale is ever neutralized by the uncomeliness
of his raiment and the inartistic besmirchedness
of his countenance. His pleading is like the
pathos of some moving ballad from the lips of a
negro minstrel; shut your eyes and it shall make you
fumble in your pocket for your handkerchief; open
them, and you would fain draw out a pistol instead.

It is to be wished that Poverty would garb
his body in a clean skin, that Adversity would

[figure description] Page 087.[end figure description]

cultivate a taste for spotless linen, and that Beggary
would address himself unto your pocket from
beneath a downy hat. However, we cannot hope
to immediately impress these worthy mendicants
with the advantage of devoting a portion of their gains
to the purchase of purple and fine linen, instead
of expending their all upon the pleasures of the table
and riotous living; but our duty unto them remains.

The very least that one can do for the offensive
needy is to direct them to the nearest clothier.
That, therefore, is the proper course.

Every one has observed a solitary ant breasting
a current of his fellows as he retraces his steps to
pack off something he has forgotten. At each
meeting with a neighbour there is a mutual pause,
and the two confront each other for a moment,
reaching out their delicate antennæ, and making a
critical examination of one another's person. This
the little creature repeats with tireless persistence
to the end of his journey.

As with the ant, so with the other insect—the
sprightly “female of our species.” It is really
delightful to watch the line frenzy of her lovely
eye as she notes the approach of a woman more
gorgeously arrayed than herself, or the triumphant

[figure description] Page 088.[end figure description]

contempt that settles about her lips at the advance
of a poorly clad sister. How contemplatively she
lingers upon each detail of attire—with what keen
penetration she takes in the general effect at a sweep!

And this suggests the fearful thought—what
would the darlings do if they wore no clothes?
One-half their pleasure in walking on the street
would vanish like a dream, and an equal proportion
of the philosopher's happiness in watching
them would perish in the barren prospect of an
inartistic nudity.

Why do people attend public picnics? We do
not wish to be iterative, but why do they? Heaven
help them! it is because they know no better, and
no one has had the leisure to enlighten them.

Now your picnic-goer is a muff—an egregious,
gregarious muff, and a glutton. Moreover, a
nobody who, if he be male wears, in nine cases in
ten, a red necktie and a linen duster to his heel;
if she be female hath soiled hose to her calf, and
in her face a premonition of colic to come.

We hold it morally impossible to attend a picnic
and come home pure in heart and undefiled of cuticle.
For the dust will get in your nose, clog your ears,
make clay in your mouth and mortar in your eyes,

[figure description] Page 089.[end figure description]

and so stop up all the natural passages to the
soul; whereby the wickedness which that subtle
organ doth constantly excrete is balked of its issue,
tainting the entire system with a grievous taint.

At picnics, moreover, is engendered an unpleasant
perspiration, which the patient must perforce endure
until he shall bathe him in a bath. It is not
sweet to reek, and your picnicker must reek.
Should he chance to break a leg, or she a limb, the
inevitable exposure of the pedal condition is alarming
and eke humiliating.

There be those of us whose memories, though
vexed with an oyster-rake would not yield matter
for gratitude, and whose piety though strained
through a sieve would leave no trace of an object
upon which to lavish thanks. It is easy enough,
with a waistcoat selected for the occasion, to eat
one's proportion of turkey and hide away one's
allowance of wine; and if this be returning thanks,
why then gratitude is considerably easier, and
vastly more agreeable, than falling off a log, and
may be acquired in one easy lesson without a
master. But if more than this be required—if to
be grateful means anything beyond being gluttonous,
your true philosopher—he of the severe

[figure description] Page 090.[end figure description]

brow upon which logic has stamped its eternal
impress, and from whose heart sentiment has been
banished along with other small vices—your true
philosopher, say we, will think twice before he
“crooks the pregnant hinges of the knee” in
humble observance of the day.

For here is the nut of reason he is obliged to
crack before he can obtain the kernel of emotion
proper to the day. Unless the blessings we enjoy
are favours from the Omnipotent, to be grateful
is to be absurd. If they are, then, also the ills
with which we are afflicted have the same origin.
Grant this, and you make an offset of the latter
against the former, or are driven either to the
ridiculous position that we must be equally grateful
for both evils and blessings, or the no less
ridiculous one that all evils are blessings in
disguise.

But the truth is, my fine friend, your annual
gratitude is a sorry sham, a cloak, my good
fellow, to cover your unhandsome gluttony; and
when by chance you do take to your knees, it is
only that you prefer to digest your bird in that
position. We understand your case accurately,
and the hard sense we are poking at you is not a
preachment for your edification, but a bit of harmless
fun fo our own diversion. For, look you!
there is really a subtle but potent relation between

[figure description] Page 091.[end figure description]

the gratitude of the spirit and the stuffing of the
flesh.

We have ever taught the identity of Soul and
Stomach; these are but different names for one
object considered under differing aspects. Thankfulness
we believe to be a kind of ether evolved by
the action of the gastric fluid upon rich meats.
Like all gases it ascends, and so passes out of the
œsophagus in prayer and psalmody. This beautiful
theory we have tested by convincing experiments
in the manner following:—

Experiment 1st.—A quantity of grass was placed
in a large bladder, and a gill of the gastric fluid of
a sheep introduced. In ten minutes the neck of
the bladder emitted a contented bleat.

Experiment 2nd.—A pound of beef was substituted
for the grass, and the fluid of a dog for that of the
sheep. The result was a cheerful bark, accompanied
by an agitation of the bottom of the bladder, as if
it were attempting to wag an imaginary tail.

Experiment 3rd.—The bladder was charged with
a handful of chopped turkey, and an ounce of
human gastric juice obtained from the Coroner.
At first, nothing but a deep sigh of satisfaction
escaped from the neck of the bladder, followed by
an unmistakeable grunt, similar to that of a hog.
Upon increasing the proportion of turkey, and
confining the gas, the bladder was very much

[figure description] Page 092.[end figure description]

distended, appearing to suffer great uneasiness.
The restriction being removed, the neck distinctly
articulated the words “Praise God, from whom all
blessings flow!”

Against such demonstration as this any mere
theological theorizing is of no avail.

It may justly be demanded of the essayist that
he shall give some small thought to the question of
corporal punishment by means of the “cat,” and
“ground-ash.” We have given the subject the
most elaborate attention; we have written page
aftr page upon it. Day and night we have toiled
and perspired over that distressing problem.
Through Summer's sun and Winter's snow, with an
unfaltering purpose, we have strung miles of ink
upon acres of paper, weaving wisdom into eloquence
with the tireless industry of a silkworm fashioning
his cocoon. We have refused food, scorned sleep,
and endured thirst to see our work grow beneath
our cunning hand. The more we wrote the wiser
we became; the opinions of one day were rejected
the next; the blind surmising of yesterday ripened
into the full knowledge of to-day, and this matured
into the superhuman omniscience of this evening.
We have finally got so infernally clever that we

[figure description] Page 093.[end figure description]

have abandoned the original design of our great
work, and determined to make it a compendium
of everything that is accurately known up to date,
and the bearing of this upon flogging in general.

To other, and inferior, writers it is most fortunate
that our design has taken so wide a scope. These
can go on with their perennial wrangle over the
petty question of penal and educational flagellation,
while we grapple with the higher problem,
and unfold the broader philosophy of an universal
walloping.

Reflection 1.—The beneficent influence of the
Press is most talked about by the Press.

Reflection 2.—If the Press were less evenly divided
upon all social, political, and moral questions the
influence of its beneficence would be greater than
it is.

Reflection 3.—The beneficence of its influence
would be more marked.

Reflection 4.—If the Press were more wise and
righteous than it is, it might escape the reproach
of being more foolish and wicked than it should be.

Reflection 5.—The foregoing Reflection is not an
identical proposition.

[figure description] Page 094.[end figure description]

Reflection 6.—(a) The beneficent influence of the
Press cannot be purchased for money. (b) It can
if you have enough money.

Charity is certain to bring its reward—if judiciously
bestowed. The Anglo-Saxons are the most
charitable race in the world—and the most judicious.
The right hand should never know of the charity
that the left hand giveth. There is, however, no
objection to putting it in the papers. Charity is
usually represented with a babe in her arms—
going to place it benevolently upon a rich man's
doorstep.

To the close student of human nature no place
offers such manifold attractions, such possibilities of
deep insight, such a mine of suggestion, such a
prodigality of illustration, as a pig-pen at feeding
time. It has been said, with allusion to this
philosophical pursuit, that “there is no place like
home;” but it will be seen that this is but another
form of the same assertion.—End of the Essay upon
the Study of Human Nature.

[figure description] Page 095.[end figure description]

.... Life in the country may be
compared to the aimless drifting of a house-dog
professing to busy himself about a lawn. He goes
nosing about, tacking and turning here and there
with the most intense apparent earnestness; and
finally seizes a blade of grass by the middle, chews it
savagely, drops it, gags comically, and curls away
to sleep as if worn out with some mighty exercise.
Whatever pursuit you may engage in in the country
is sure to end in nausea, which you are quite as
sure to try to get recognised as fatigue.

.... A windmill keeps its fans
going about; they do not stop long in one position.
A man should be like the fans of a windmill; he
should go about a good deal, and not stop long—
in the country.

.... A great deal has been written
and said and sung in praise of green trees. And
yet there are comparatively few green trees that

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are good to eat. Asparagus is probably the best
of them, though celery is by no means to be despised.
Both may be obtained in any good market in the
city.

.... A cow in walking does not, as
is popularly supposed, pick up all her feet at once,
but only one of them at a time. Which one
depends upon circumstances. The cow is but an
indifferent pedestrian. Hœc fabula docet that one
should not keep three-fourths of his capital lying
idle.

.... The Quail is a very timorous
bird, who never achieves anything notable, yet he
has a crest. The Jay, who is of a warlike and
powerful family, has no crest. There is a moral in
this which Aristocracy will do well to ponder.
But the quail is very good to eat and the jay is
not. The quail is entitled to a crest. (In the
Eastern States, this meditation will provoke dispute,
for there the jay has a crest and the quail has not.
The Eastern States are exceptional and inferior.)

.... The destruction of rubbish with fire makes a very great smoke. In this

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particular a battle resembles the destruction of rubbish.
There would be a close resemblance even if a battle
evolved no smoke. Rubbish, by the way, is not
good eating, but an essayist should not be a gourmet—
in the country.

.... Sweet milk should be taken
only in the middle of the night. If taken during
the day it forms a curd in the stomach, and breeds
a dire distress. In the middle of the night the
stomach is supposed to be innocent of whisky, and
it is the whisky that curdles the milk. Should
you be sleeping nicely, I would not advise you to
come out of that condition to drink sweet milk.

.... In the country the atmosphere
is of unequal density, and in passing through the
denser portions your silk hat will be ruffled, and
the country people will jeer at it. They will jeer at
it anyhow. When going into the country, you
should leave your silk hat at a bank, taking a
certificate of deposit.

.... The sheep chews too fast to
enjoy his victual.

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CURRENT JOURNALINGS.

[figure description] Page 099.[end figure description]

.... Following is the manner of
death incurred by Dr. Deadwood, the eelebrated
African explorer, which took place at Ujijijijiji,
under the auspices of the Royal Geographical
Society of England, assisted, at some distance, by
Mr. Shandy of the New York Herald:—

An intelligent gorilla has recently been imported
to this country, who had the good fortune to serve the
Doctor as a body servant in the interior of Africa,
and he thus describes the manner of his master's
death. The Doctor was accustomed to pass his
nights in the stomach of an acquaintance—a crocodile
about fifty feet long. Stepping out one
evening to take an observation of one of the lunar
eclipses peculiar to the country, he spoke to his
host, saying that as he should not return until
after bedtime, he would not trouble him to sit
up to let him in; he would just leave the door
open till he came home. By way of doing so, he
set up a stout fence-rail between his landlord's
distended jaws, and went away.

[figure description] Page 100.[end figure description]

Returning about midnight, he took off his boots
outside, so as not to awaken his friend, entered
softly, knocked away the prop, and prepared to
turn in. But the noise of pounding on the rail
had aroused the householder, and so great was
the feeling of relief induced by the relaxation
of the maxillary muscles, that he unconsciously
shut his mouth to smile, without giving his tenant
time to get into the bedroom. The Doctor was
just stooping to untie his drawers, when he was
caught between the floor and ceiling, like a lemon
in a squeezer.

Next day the melancholy remains were given up
to our informant, who displays a singular reticence
regarding his disposition of them; merely picking
his teeth with his claws in an absent, thoughtful
kind of way, as if the subject were too mournful to
be discussed in all its harrowing details.

None of the Doctor's maps or instruments were
recovered; his bereaved landlord holds them as
security for certain rents claimed to be due and
unpaid. It is probable that Great Britain will
make a stern demand for them, and if they are
not at once surrendered will—submit her claim to
a Conference.

.... The prim young maidens who
affiliate with the Young Men's Christian

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Association of San Francisco—who furnish the posies for
their festivals, and assist in the singing of psalms—
have a gymnasium in the temple. Thither they
troop nightly to display their skill in turning inside
out and shutting themselves up like jack-knives of
the gentler kind.

Here may be seen the godly Rachel and the
serious Ruth, suspended by their respective toes
between the heaven to which they aspire and the
wicked world they do abhor. Here the meek-eyed
Hannah, pendent from the horizontal bar, doubleth
herself upon herself and stares fixedly backward
from between her shapely limbs, a thing of beauty
and a joy for several minutes. Mehitable Ann,
beloved of young Soapenlocks, vaults lightly over
a barrier and with unspoken prayer lays hold
on the unstable trapeze mounting aloft in air.
Jerusha, comeliest of her sex, ties herself in a
double bow-knot, and meditates upon the doctrine
of election.

O, blessed temple of grace divine! O, innocence
and youth and simple faith! O, water and molasses
and unsalted butter! O, niceness absolute and
godly whey! Would that we were like unto these
ewe lambs, that we might frisk and gambol among
them without evil. Would that we were female,
and Christian, and immature, with a flavour as of
green grass and a hope in heaven. Then would

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we, too, sing hymns through our blessed nose, and
contort and musculate with much satisfaction of
soul, even in the gymnasium of The Straightbacked.

.... Some raging iconoclast, after
having overthrown religion by history, upset history
by science, and then toppled over science, has now
laid his impious hands upon babies' nursing bottles.

“The tubes of these infernal machines,” says this
tearing beast, “are composed of india-rubber dissolved
in bisulphide of carbon, and thickened with
lead, resin, and sometimes oxysulphuret of antimony,
from which, when it comes in contact with
the milk, sulphuretted hydrogen is evolved, and
lactate of lead formed in the stomach.”

This logic is irresistible. Granting only that the
tubes are made in that simple and intelligible manner
(and anybody can see for himself that they are),
the sulphuretted hydrogen and the lactate of lead
follow (down the œsophagus) as a logical sequence.
But the scientific horror seems to be profoundly
unaware that these substances are not only harmless
to the child, but actually nutritious and
essential to its growth. Not only so, but nature
has implanted in its breast an instinctive craving
for these very comforts. Often have we seen some
wee thing turn disgusted from the breast and lift

[figure description] Page 103.[end figure description]

up its thin voice: “Not for Joseph; give me the
bottle with the oxysulphuret of antimony tube.
I take sulphuretted hydrogen and lactate of lead in
mine every time!” And we have said: “Nature
is working in that darling. What God hath joined
together let no man put asunder!”

And we have thought of the wicked iconoclast.

.... There are a lot of evil-minded
horses about the city, who seem to take a fiendish
delight in letting fly their heels at whomsoever
they catch in a godly reverie unconscious of their
proximity. This is perfectly natural and human,
but it is annoying to be always getting horse-
kicked when one is not in a mood for it.

The worst of it is, these horses always manage it
so as to get tethered across the sidewalk in the most
populous thoroughfares, where they at once drop
into the semblance of a sound slumber. By this
means they lure the unsuspecting to their doom,
and just as some unconscious pedestrian is passing
astern of them they wake up, and without a
preliminary yawn, or even a warning shake of the
tail like the more chivalrous rattlesnake, they at
once discharge their feet at him with a rapidity
and effect that are quite surprising if the range be
not too long. Usually this occurs in Merchantstreet,
below Montgomery, and the damage is

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merely nominal; some worthless Italian fisherman,
market gardener, or decayed gentleman oozing out
of a second-class restaurant being the only sufferer.

But not unfrequently these playful brutes get
themselves tethered in some fashionable promenade,
and the consequence is demoralizing to white
people. We speak within the limits of possibility
when we say that we have seen no less than seven
women and children in the air at once, impelled
heavenward by as many consecutive kicks of a
single skilled operator. No longer ago than we
can remember we saw an aged party in spectacles
and a clawhammer coat gyrating through the air
like an irregular bolt shot out of a catapult.
Before we could ascertain from him the site of
the quadruped from whom he had received his
impulsion, he had passed like a vague dream, and
the equine scoundrel went unwhipped of justice.

These flying squadrons are serious inconveniences
to public travel; it is conducive to profanity to
have a whizzing young woman, a rattling old man,
or a singing baby flung against one's face every few
moments by the hoofs of some animal whom one
has never injured, and who is a perfect stranger.

It ought to be stopped.

.... In the telegraphic account of
a distressing railway accident in New York, we

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find the following:—“The body of Mr. Germain
was identified by his business partner, John Austin,
who seemed terribly affected by his loss.”

O, reader, how little we think upon the fearful
possibilities hidden away in the womb of the
future. Any day may snatch from our life its
light. One moment we were happy in the possession
of some dear object, about which to twine
the tendrils of the heart; the next, we cower and
shiver in the chill gloom of a bereavement that
withers the soul and makes existence an intolerable
burden! To-day all nature smiles with a
sunny warmth, and life spreads before us a wilderness
of sweets; to-morrow — we lose our business
partner!

.... Mr. J. L. Dummle, one of our
most respected citizens, left his home to go, as he
said, to his office. There was nothing unusual in
his demeanour, and he appeared to be in his customary
health and spirits. It is not known that there
was anything in his financial or domestic affairs to
make life distasteful to him. About half an hour
after parting with his family, he was seen conversing
with a friend at the corner of Kearny and Sutterstreets,
from which point he seems to have gone
directly to the Vallejo-street wharf. He was here
seen by the captain of the steamer New World,

[figure description] Page 106.[end figure description]

standing upon the extreme end of the wharf, but
the circumstance did not arouse any suspicion in the
mind of the Captain, to whom he was well known.
At that moment some trivial business diverted the
Captain's attention, and he saw Mr. Dummle no
more; but it has been ascertained that the latter
proceeded directly home, where he may now be
seen by any one desiring to obtain further particulars
of the melancholy event here narrated.

Mr. Dummle speaks of it with perfect frankness
and composure.

.... In deference to a time-worn
custom, on the first day of the year the writer
swore to, affixed a revenue stamp upon, and recorded
the following document:—

“I will not, during this year, utter a profane
word—unless in sport—without having been previously
vexed by something.

“I will murder no one that does not offend me,
except for his money.

“I will commit highway robbery upon none but
small school children, and then only under the
stimulus of present or prospective hunger.

“I will not bear false witness against my neighbour
where nothing is to be made by it.

“I will be as moral and religious as the law shall
compel me to be.

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