_The appearance of a new book is an indication that another man has found a mission, has entered upon the performance of a lofty duty, actuated only by the noblest impulses that can spur the soul of man to action. It is the proudest boast of the profession of literature, that no man ever published a book for selfish purposes or with ignoble aim. Books have been published for the consolation of the distressed; for the guidance of the wandering; for the relief of the destitute; for the hope of the penitent; for uplifting the burdened soul above its sorrows and fears; for the general amelioration of the condition of all mankind; for the right against the wrong; for the good against the bad; for the truth. This book is published for two dollars per volume._

_R. J. B._

PAGE.

A BOY’S DAY AT HOME, 273

A BURLINGTON ADDER, 94

A BURLINGTON NOVELETTE, 173

A CANDID CONFESSION, 171

A MODERN GOBLIN, 210

A RAINY DAY IDYL, 86

A REMINISCENCE OF EXHIBITION DAY, 177

A SAFE BET, 204

A SUNDAY IDYL, 262

A TACITURN WITNESS, 124

A THRILLING ENCOUNTER, 144

A TRYING SITUATION, 193

AN AUTUMNAL REVERIE, 286

BUYING A TIN CUP, 119

CORNERING THE BOYS, 128

DANGERS OF BATHING, 164

DRIVING THE COW, 64

FIVE WOMEN, 146

GETTING READY FOR THE TRAIN, 59

HAWK-EYETEMS, 298-328

INFANTILE SCINTILLATIONS, 293

INSPIRATIONS OF TRUTH, 156

LIFE IN THE “HAWKEYE” SANCTUM, 109

MASTER BILDERBACK RETURNS TO SCHOOL, 74

MASTER BILDERBACK’S POULTRY YARD, 258

MIDDLERIB’S DOG, 270

MIDDLERIB’S PICNIC, 250

MIND READING, 200

MISAPPLIED SCIENCE, 96

MR. BARINGER’S HOUSE-CLEANING, 282

MR. BILDERBACK LOSES HIS HAT, 195

MR. GEROLMAN LOSES HIS DOG, 82

MR. OLENDORF’S COMPLAINT, 180

ODE TO AUTUMN, 78

ONE OF THE LEGION, 121

RUPERTINO’S PANORAMA, 266

RURAL FELICITY, 185

SELLING THE HEIRLOOM, 129

SETTLING UNDER DIFFICULTIES, 296

SINGULAR TRANSFORMATION, 87

SODDING AS A FINE ART, 135

SPECIAL PROVIDENCES, 279

SPIRIT PHOTOGRAPHY, 158

SPRING DAYS IN BURLINGTON, 108

SPRING TIME IN AMERICA, 115

SUBURBAN SOLITUDE, 90

THE AMENITIES OF POLITICS, 139

THE ARTLESS PRATTLE OF CHILDHOOD, 102

THE AUTOMATIC CLOTHES-LINE REEL, 152

THE DEMAND FOR LIGHT LABOR, 70

THE GARDEN OF THE GODS, 189

THE GOBLIN GATE, 148

THE LANGUAGE OF FLOWERS, 113

THE LAY OF THE COW, 206

THE POWER OF DIGNITY, 169

THE RISE AND FALL OF THE MUSTACHE, 9

THE ROMANCE OF THE CARPET, 132

THE SEEDSMAN, 127

THE SORROWS OF THE POOR, 79

VOICES OF THE NIGHT, 67

WHY MR. BOSTWICK MOVED, 275

WIDE-AWAKE, 99

WOODLAND MUSIC AND POETRY, 116

WRITING FOR THE PRESS, 161

YOUNG MR. COFFINBERRY BUYS A DOG, 207

THE RISE AND FALL

OF

THE MUSTACHE.

We open our eyes in this living world around us, in a wonder land, peopled with dreams, and haunted with wonderful shapes; and every day dawns upon us in a medley of new marvels. We are awakened from these dreams by contact with hard, stubborn facts, not rudely and harshly, but gradually and tenderly. So much that is bright and beautiful, and full of romance and wonder, passes away with the earlier years of life, that by the time we are able to earn our first salary we hold in our hands only the crumpled, withered leaves of childhood’s simple creeds and loving superstitions. Year after year, the iconoclastic hand of earnest, real life, tears from the lofty pedestals upon which our loving fancy had enshrined them, the gods of gold that crumble into worthless clay at our feet. We live to lose faith, at last, in “Puss in Boots;” we cease to weep over the sad tragedy of “Cock Robin;” there comes a time when we can read “Arabian Nights,” and then go to bed without a tremor; with one heart-breaking pang at last we give up darling “Jack the Giant Killer,” and acknowledge him to be the fraud he stands confessed; it is not long after that, we learn to look upon William Tell as a national myth, and then we come to know, in spite of all that orthodox theology has taught us to the contrary, that Adam was not the first man--that raised a mustache. Adam was too old--when he was born--to care very much about what our grander and more gradually developed civilization considers the crowning facial ornament. And after his natural human idleness got him into perfectly natural human trouble, he was kept too busy something to put under his lip, to think much about what grew above it. If Adam wore a mustache, he never raised it. It raised itself. It evolved itself out of its own inner consciousness, like a primordial germ. It grew, like the weeds on his farm, in spite of him, and to torment him. For Adam had hardly got his farm reduced to a kind of turbulent, weed producing, granger fighting, regular order of things--had scarcely settled down to the quiet, happy, care-free, independent life of a jocund farmer, with nothing under the canopy to molest or make him afraid, with every thing on the plantation going on smoothly and lovelily, with a little rust in the oats; army worm in the corn; Colorado beetles swarming up and down the potato patch; cut-worms laying waste the cucumbers; curculio in the plums and borers in the apple trees; a new kind of bug that he didn’t know the name of desolating the wheat fields; dry weather burning up the wheat, wet weather blighting the corn; too cold for the melons, too dreadfully hot for the strawberries; chickens dying with the pip; hogs being gathered to their fathers with the cholera; sheep fading away with a complication of things that no man could remember; horses getting along as well as could be expected, with a little spavin, ring bone, wolf teeth, distemper, heaves, blind staggers, collar chafes, saddle galls, colic now and then, founder occasionally, epizootic when there was nothing else; cattle going wild with the horn ail; moth in the bee hives; snakes in the milk house; moles in the kitchen garden--Adam had just about got through breaking wild land with a crooked stick, and settled down comfortably, when the sound of the boy was heard in the land.

Did it ever occur to you that Adam was probably the most troubled and worried man that ever lived? We have always pictured Adam as a care-worn looking man; a puzzled looking granger who would sigh fifty times a day, and sit down on a log and run his irresolute fingers through his hair while he wondered what under the canopy he was going to do with those boys, and whatever was going to become of them. We have thought too, that as often as our esteemed parent asked himself this conundrum, he gave it up. They must have been a source of constant trouble and mystification to him. For you see they were the first boys that humanity ever had any experience with. And there was no one else in the neighborhood who had any boy, with whom Adam, in his moments of perplexity, could consult. There wasn’t a boy in the country with whom Adam’s boys were on speaking terms, and with whom they could play and fight. Adam, you see, labored under the most distressing disadvantages that ever opposed a married man and the father of a family. He had never been a boy himself, and what could he know about boy nature or boy troubles and pleasure? His perplexity began at an early date. Imagine, if you can, the celerity with which he kicked off the leaves, and paced up and down in the moonlight the first time little Cain made the welkin ring when he had the colic. How did Adam know what ailed him? He couldn’t tell Eve that she had been sticking the baby full of pins. He didn’t even know enough to turn the vociferous infant over on his face and jolt him into serenity. If the fence corners on his farm had been overgrown with catnip, never an idea would Adam have had what to do with it. It is probable that after he got down on his knees and felt for thorns or snakes or rats in the bed, and thoroughly examined young Cain for bites or scratches, he passed him over to Eve with the usual remark, “There, take him and hush him up, for heaven’s sake,” and then went off and sat down under a distant tree with his fingers in his ears, and perplexity in his brain. And young Cain just split the night with the most hideous howls the little world had ever listened to. It must have stirred the animals up to a degree that no menagerie has ever since attained. There was no sleep in the vicinity of Eden that night for anybody, baby, beasts or Adam. And it is more than probable that the weeds got a long start of Adam the next day, while he lay around in shady places and slept in troubled dozes, disturbed, perhaps by awful visions of possible twins and more colic.

And when the other boy came along, and the boys got old enough to sleep in a bed by themselves, they had no pillows to fight with, and it is a moral impossibility for two brothers to go to bed without a fracas. And what comfort could two boys get out of pelting each other with fragments of moss or bundles of brush? What dismal views of future humanity Adam must have received from the glimpses of original sin which began to develop itself in his boys. How he must have wondered what put into their heads the thousand and one questions with which they plied their parents day after day. We wonder what he thought when they first began to string buckeyes on the cat’s tail. And when night came, there was no hired girl to keep the boys quiet by telling them ghost stories, and Adam didn’t even know so much as an anecdote.

Cain, when he made his appearance, was the first and only boy in the fair young world. And all his education depended on his inexperienced parents, who had never in their lives seen a boy until they saw Cain. And there wasn’t an educational help in the market. There wasn’t an alphabet block in the county; not even a Centennial illustrated handkerchief. There were no other boys in the republic, to teach young Cain to lie, and swear, and smoke, and drink, fight, and steal, and thus develop the boy’s dormant statesmanship, and prepare him for the sterner political duties of his maturer years. There wasn’t a pocket knife in the universe that he could borrow--and lose, and when he wanted to cut his finger, as all boys must do, now and then, he had to cut it with a clam shell. There were no country relations upon whom little Cain could be inflicted for two or three weeks at a time, when his wearied parents wanted a little rest. There was nothing for him to play with. Adam couldn’t show him how to make a kite. He had a much better idea of angels’ wings than he had of a kite. And if little Cain had even asked for such a simple bit of mechanism as a shinny club, Adam would have gone out into the depths of the primeval forest and wept in sheer mortification and helpless, confessed ignorance. I don’t wonder that Cain turned out bad. I always said he would. For his entire education depended upon a most ignorant man, a man in the very palmiest days of his ignorance, who couldn’t have known less if he had tried all his life on a high salary and had a man to help him. And the boy’s education had to be conducted entirely upon the catechetical system; only, in this instance, the boy pupil asked the questions, and his parent teachers, heaven help them, tried to answer them. And they had to answer at them. For they could not take refuge from the steady stream of questions that poured in upon them day after day, by interpolating a fairy story, as you do when your boy asks you questions about something of which you never heard. For how could Adam begin, “Once upon a time,” when with one quick, incisive question, Cain could pin him right back against the dead wall of creation, and make him either specify exactly what time, or acknowledge the fraud? How could Eve tell him about “Jack and the bean stalk,” when Cain, fairly crazy for some one to play with, knew perfectly well there was not, and never had been, another boy on the plantation? And as day by day Cain brought home things in his hands about which to ask questions that no mortal could answer, how grateful his bewildered parents must have been that he had no pockets in which to transport his collections. For many generations came into the fair young world, got into no end of trouble, and died out of it, before a boy’s pocket solved the problem how to make the thing contained seven times greater than the container. The only thing that saved Adam and Eve from interrogational insanity was the paucity of language. If little Cain had possessed the verbal abundance of the language in which men are to-day talked to death, his father’s bald head would have gone down in shining flight to the ends of the earth to escape him, leaving Eve to look after the stock, save the crop, and raise her boy as best she could. Which would have been, 6,000 years ago, as to-day, just like a man.

Because, it was no off hand, absent-minded work answering questions about things in those spacious old days, when there was crowds of room, and everything grew by the acre. When a placid, but exceedingly unanimous looking animal went rolling by, producing the general effect of an eclipse, and Cain would shout, “Oh, lookee, lookee pa! what’s that?” the patient Adam, trying to saw enough kitchen wood to last over Sunday, with a piece of flint, would have to pause and gather up words enough to say:

“That, my son? That is only a mastodon giganteus; he has a bad look, but a Christian temper.”

And then, presently:

“Oh, pop! pop! What’s that over yon?”

“Oh, bother,” Adam would reply; “it’s only a paleotherium, mammalia pachydermata.”

“Oh, yes; theliocomeafterus. Oh! lookee, lookee at this ’un!”

“Where, Cainny? Oh, that in the mud? That’s only an acephala lamelli branchiata. It won’t bite you, but you mustn’t eat it. It’s poison as politics.”

“Whee! See there! see, see, see! What’s him?”

“Oh, that? Looks like a plesiosaurus; keep out of his way; he has a jaw like your mother.”

“Oh yes; a plenosserus. And what’s that fellow, poppy?”

“That’s a silurus malapterus. Don’t you go near him, for he has the disposition of a Georgia mule.”

“Oh, yes; a slapterus. And what’s this little one?”

“Oh, it’s nothing but an aristolochioid. Where did you get it? There now, quit throwing stones at that acanthopterygian; do you want to be kicked? And keep away from the nothodenatrichomanoides. My stars, Eve! where _did_ he get that anonaceo-hydrocharideo-nymphæoid? Do you never look after him at all? Here, you Cain, get right away down from there, and chase that megalosaurius out of the melon patch, or I’ll set the monopleuro branchian on you.”

Just think of it, Christian man with a family to support, with last year’s stock on your shelves, and a draft as long as a clothes-line to pay to-morrow! Think of it, woman with all a woman’s love and constancy, and a mother’s sympathetic nature, with three meals a day 365 times a year to think of, and the flies to chase out of the sitting-room; think, if your cherub boy was the only boy in the wide wide world, and all his questions which now radiate in a thousand directions among other boys, who tell him lies and help him to cut his eye-teeth, were focused upon you! Adam had only one consolation that has been denied his more remote descendants. His boy never belonged to a base ball club, and never teased his father from the first of November till the last of March for a pair of skates.

Well, you have no time to pity Adam. You have your own boy to look after. Or, your neighbor has a boy, whom you can look after much more closely than his mother does, and much more to your own satisfaction than to the boy’s comfort. Your boy is, as Adam’s boy was, an animal that asks questions. If there were any truth in the old theory of the transmigration of souls, when a boy died he would pass into an interrogation point. And he’d stay there. He’d never get out of it; for he never gets through asking questions. The older he grows the more he asks, and the more perplexing his questions are, and the more unreasonable he is about wanting them answered to suit himself. Why, the oldest boy I ever knew--he was fifty-seven years old, and I went to school to him--could and did ask the longest, hardest, crookedest questions, that no fellow, who used to trade off all his books for a pair of skates and a knife with a corkscrew in it, could answer. And when his questions were not answered to suit him, it was his custom--a custom more honored in the breeches, we used to think, than in the observance--to take up a long, slender, but exceedingly tenacious rod, which lay ever near the big dictionary, and smite with it the boy whose naturally derived Adamic ignorance was made manifest. Ah me, if the boy could only do as he is done by, and ferule the man or the woman who fails to reply to his inquiries, as he is himself corrected for similar shortcomings, what a valley of tears, what a literally howling wilderness he could and would make of this world.

Your boy, asking to-day pretty much the same questions, with heaven knows how many additional ones, that Adam’s boy did, is told, every time he asks one that you don’t know any thing about, just as Adam told Cain fifty times a day, that he will know all about it when he is a man. And so from the days of Cain down to the present wickeder generation of boys, the boy ever looks forward to the time when he will be a man and know everything. That happy, far away, omniscient, unattainable manhood, which never comes to your boy; which would never come to him if he lived a thousand years; manhood, that like boyhood, ever looks forward from to-day to the morrow; still peering into the future for brighter light and broader knowledge; day after day, as its world opens before it, stumbling upon ever new and unsolved mysteries; manhood, whose wisdom is folly and whose light is often darkness, and whose knowledge is selfishness; manhood, that so often looks over its shoulder and glances back toward boyhood, when its knowledge was at least always equal to its day; manhood, that after groping for years through tangled labyrinths of failing human theories and tottering human wisdom, at last only rises to the sublimity of childhood, only reaches the grandeur of boyhood, and accepts the grandest, eternal truths of the universe, truths that it does not comprehend, truths that it can not, by searching, find out, accepting and believing them with the simple, unquestioning faith of childhood in Truth itself.

And now, your boy, not entirely ceasing to ask questions, begins to answer them, until you stand amazed at the breadth and depth of his knowledge. He asks questions and gets answers of teachers that you and the school board know not of. Day by day, great unprinted books, upon the broad pages of which the hand of nature has traced characters that only a boy can read, are spread out before him. He knows now where the first snow-drop lifts its tiny head, a pearl on the bosom of the barren earth, in the Spring; he knows where the last Indian pink lingers, a flame in the brown and rustling woods, in the autumn days. His pockets are cabinets, from which he drags curious fossils that he does not know the names of; monstrous and hideous beetles and bugs and things that you never saw before, and for which he has appropriate names of his own. He knows where there are three orioles’ nests, and so far back as you can remember, you never saw an oriole’s nest in your life. He can tell you how to distinguish the good mushrooms from the poisonous ones, and poison grapes from good ones, and how he ever found out, except by eating both kinds, is a mystery to his mother. Every root, bud, leaf, berry or bark, that will make any bitter, horrible, semi-poisonous tea, reputed to have marvelous medicinal virtues, he knows where to find, and in the season he does find, and brings home, and all but sends the entire family to the cemetery by making practical tests of his teas.

And as his knowledge broadens, his human superstition develops itself. He has a formula, repeating which nine times a day, while pointing his finger fixedly toward the sun, will cause warts to disappear from the hand, or, to use his own expression, will “knock warts.” If the eight day clock at home tells him it is two o’clock, and the flying leaves of the dandelion declare it is half-past five, he will stand or fall with the dandelion. He has a formula, by which any thing that has been lost may be found. He has, above all things, a natural, infallible instinct for the woods, and can no more be lost in them than a squirrel. If the cow does not come home--and if she is a town cow, like a town man, she does not come home, three nights in the week--you lose half a day of valuable time looking for her. Then you pay a man three dollars to look for her two days longer, or so long as the appropriation holds out. Finally, a quarter sends a boy to the woods; he comes back at milking time, whistling the tune that no man ever imitated, and the cow ambles contentedly along before him. He has one particular marble which he regards with about the same superstitious reverence that a pagan does his idol, and his Sunday-school teacher can’t drive it out of him, either. Carnelian, crystal, bull’s eye, china, pottery, boly, blood alley, or commie, whatever he may call it, there is “luck in it.” When he loses this marble, he sees panic and bankruptcy ahead of him, and retires from business prudently, before the crash comes, failing, in true centennial style, with both pockets and a cigar box full of winnings, and a creditors’ meeting in the back room. A boy’s world is open to no one but a boy. You never really revisit the glimpses of your boyhood, much as you may dream of it. After you get into a tail-coat, and tight boots, you never again set foot in boy world. You lose this marvelous instinct for the woods, you can’t tell a pig-nut tree from a pecan; you can’t make friends with strange dogs; you can’t make the terrific noises with your mouth, you can’t invent the inimitable signals or the characteristic catchwords of boyhood.

He is getting on, is your boy. He reaches the dime novel age. He wants to be a missionary. Or a pirate. So far as he expresses any preference, he would rather be a pirate, an occupation in which there are more chances for making money, and fewer opportunities for being devoured. He develops a yearning love for school and study about this time, also, and every time he dreams of being a pirate he dreams of hanging his dear teacher at the yard arm in the presence of the delighted scholars. His voice develops, even more rapidly and thoroughly than his morals. In the yard, on the house top, down the street, around the corner; wherever there is a patch of ice big enough for him to break his neck on, or a pond of water deep enough to drown in, the voice of your boy is heard. He whispers in a shout, and converses, in ordinary, confidential moments, in a shriek. He exchanges bits of back-fence gossip about his father’s domestic matters with the boy living in the adjacent township, to which interesting revelations of home life the intermediate neighborhood listens with intense satisfaction, and the two home circles in helpless dismay. He has an unconquerable hatred for company, and an aversion for walking down stairs. For a year or two his feet never touch the stairway in his descent, and his habit of polishing the stair rail by using it as a passenger tramway, soon breaks the other members of the family of the careless habit of setting the hall lamp or the water pitcher on the baluster post. He wears the same size boot as his father; and on the dryest, dustiest days in the year, always manages to convey some mud on the carpets. He carefully steps over the door mat, and until he is about seventeen years old, he actually never knew there was a scraper at the front porch. About this time, bold but inartistic pencil sketches break out mysteriously on the alluring back ground of the wall paper. He asks, with great regularity, alarming frequency, and growing diffidence, for a new hat. You might as well buy him a new disposition. He wears his hat in the air and on the ground far more than he does on his head, and he never hangs it up that he doesn’t pull the hook through the crown; unless the hook breaks off or the hat-rack pulls over. He is a perfect Robinson Crusoe in inventive genius. He can make a kite that will fly higher and pull harder than a balloon. He can, and, on occasion, will, take out a couple of the pantry shelves and make a sled that is amazement itself. The mouse-trap he builds out of the water pitcher and the family bible is a marvel of mechanical ingenuity. So is the excuse he gives for such a selection of raw material. When suddenly, some Monday morning, the clothes-line, without any just or apparent cause or provocation, shrinks sixteen feet, philosophy can not make you believe that Prof. Tice did it with his little barometer. Because, far down the dusty street, you can see Tom in the dim distance, driving a prancing team, six-in-hand, with the missing link. You send him on an errand. There are three ladies in the parlor. You have waited, as long as you can, in all courtesy, for them to go. They have developed alarming symptoms of staying to tea. And you know there aren’t half enough strawberries to go around. It is only a three minutes’ walk to the grocery, however, and Tom sets off like a rocket, and you are so pleased with his celerity and ready good nature that you want to run after him and kiss him. He is gone a long time, however. Ten minutes become fifteen, fifteen grow into twenty; the twenty swell into the half hour, and your guests exchange very significant glances as the half becomes three-quarters. Your boy returns at last. Apprehension in his downcast eyes, humility in his laggard step, penitence in the appealing slouch of his battered hat, and a pound and a half of shingle nails in his hands. “Mother,” he says, “what else was it you told me to get besides the nails?” And while you are counting your scanty store of berries to make them go round without a fraction, you hear Tom out in the back yard whistling and hammering away, building a dog house with the nails you never told him to get.

Poor Tom, he loves at this age quite as ardently as he makes mistakes and mischief. And he is repulsed quite as ardently as he makes love. If he hugs his sister, he musses her ruffle, and gets cuffed for it. Two hours later, another boy, not more than twenty-two or twenty-three years older than Tom, some neighbor’s Tom, will come in, and will just make the most hopeless, terrible, chaotic wreck of that ruffle that lace or footing can be distorted into. And the only reproof he gets is the reproachful murmur, “Must he go so soon?” when he doesn’t make a movement to go until he hears the alarm clock go off up stairs and the old gentleman in the adjoining room banging around building the morning fires, and loudly wondering if young Mr. Bostwick is going to stay to breakfast?

Tom is at this age set in deadly enmity against company, which he soon learns to regard as his mortal foe. He regards company as a mysterious and eminently respectable delegation that always stays to dinner, invariably crowds him to the second table, never leaves him any of the pie, and generally makes him late for school. Naturally, he learns to love refined society, but in a conservative, non-committal sort of a way, dissembling his love so effectually that even his parents never dream of its existence until it is gone.

Poor Tom, his life is not all comedy at this period. Go up to your boy’s room some night, and his sleeping face will preach you a sermon on the griefs and troubles that sometimes weigh his little heart down almost to breaking, more eloquently than the lips of a Spurgeon could picture them. The curtain has fallen on one day’s act in the drama of his active little life. The restless feet that all day long have pattered so far--down dusty streets, over scorching pavements, through long stretches of quiet wooded lanes, along the winding cattle paths in the deep, silent woods; that have dabbled in the cool brook where it wrangles and scolds over the shining pebbles, that have filled your house with noise and dust and racket, are still. The stained hand outside the sheet is soiled and rough, and the cut finger with the rude bandage of the boy’s own surgery, pleads with a mute, effective pathos of its own, for the mischievous hand that is never idle. On the brown cheek the trace of a tear marks the piteous close of the day’s troubles, the closing scene in a troubled little drama; trouble at school with books that were too many for him; trouble with temptations to have unlawful fun that were too strong for him, as they are frequently too strong for his father; trouble in the street with boys that were too big for him; and at last, in his home, in his castle, his refuge, trouble has pursued him until, feeling utterly friendless and in everybody’s way, he has crawled off to the dismantled den, dignified usually by the title of “the boy’s room,” and his over-charged heart has welled up into his eyes, and his last waking breath has broken into a sob, and just as he begins to think that after all, life is only one broad sea of troubles, whose restless billows, in never-ending succession, break and beat and double and dash upon the short shore line of a boy’s life, he has drifted away into the wonderland of a boy’s sleep, where fairy fingers picture his dreams. How soundly, deeply, peacefully he sleeps. No mother, who has never dragged a sleepy boy off the lounge at 9 o’clock, and hauled him off up stairs to bed, can know with what a herculean grip a square sleep takes hold of a boy’s senses, nor how fearfully and wonderfully limp and nerveless it makes him; nor how, in direct antagonism to all established laws of anatomy, it develops joints that work both ways, all the way up and down that boy. And what pen can portray the wonderful enchantments of a boy’s dreamland! No marvelous visions wrought by the weird, strange power of hasheesh, no dreams that come to the sleep of jaded woman or tired man, no ghastly specters that dance attendance upon cold mince pie, but shrink into tiresome, stale, and trifling commonplaces compared with the marvelous, the grotesque, the wonderful, the terrible, the beautiful and the enchanting scenes and people of a boy’s dreamland. This may be owing, in a great measure, to the fact that the boy never relates his dream until all the other members of the family have related theirs; and then he comes in, like a back county, with the necessary majority; like the directory of a western city, following the census of a rival town.

Tom is a miniature Ishmaelite at this period of his career. His hand is against every man, and about every man’s hand, and nearly every woman’s hand, is against him, off and on. Often, and then the iron enters his soul, the hand that is against him holds the slipper. He wears his mother’s slipper on his jacket quite as often as she wears it on her foot. And this is all wrong, unchristian and impolitic. It spreads the slipper and discourages the boy. When he reads in his Sunday-school lesson that the wicked stand in slippery places, he takes it as a direct personal reference, and he is affronted, and maybe the seeds of atheism are implanted in his breast. Moreover, this repeated application of the slipper not only sours his temper, and gives a bias to his moral ideas, but it sharpens his wits. How many a Christian mother, her soft eyes swimming in tears of real pain that plashed up from the depths of a loving heart, as she bent over her wayward boy until his heart-rending wails and piteous shrieks drowned her own choking, sympathetic, sobs, has been wasting her strength, and wearing out a good slipper, and pouring out all that priceless flood of mother-love and duty and pity and tender sympathy upon a concealed atlas-back, or a Saginaw shingle.

It is a historical fact that no boy is ever whipped twice for precisely the same offense. He varies and improves a little on every repetition of the prank, until at last he reaches a point where detection is almost impossible. He is a big boy then, and glides almost imperceptibly from the discipline of his father, under the surveillance of the police.

By easy stages he passes into the uncomfortable period of boyhood. His jacket develops into a tail-coat. The boy of to-day, who is slipped into a hollow, abbreviated mockery of a tail-coat, when he is taken out of long dresses, has no idea--not the faintest conception of the grandeur, the momentous importance of the epoch in a boy’s life that was marked by the transition from the old-fashioned cadet roundabout to the tail-coat. It is an experience that heaven, ever chary of its choicest blessings, and mindful of the decadence of the race of boys, has not vouchsafed to the untoward, forsaken boys of this wicked generation. When the roundabout went out of fashion, the heroic race of boys passed away from earth, and weeping nature sobbed and broke the moulds. The fashion that started a boy of six years on his pilgrimage of life in a miniature edition of his father’s coat, marked a period of retrogression in the affairs of men, and stamped a decaying and degenerate race. There are no boys now, or very few at least, such as peopled the grand old earth when the men of our age were boys. And that it is so, society is to be congratulated. The step from the roundabout to the tail-coat was a leap in life. It was the boy Iulus, doffing the _prætexta_ and flinging upon his shoulders the _toga virilis_ of Julius; Patroclus, donning the armor of Achilles, in which to go forth and be Hectored to death.

Tom is slow to realize the grandeur of that tail-coat, however, on its trial trip. How differently it feels from his good, snug-fitting, comfortable old jacket. It fits him too much in every direction, he knows. Every now and then he stops, with a gasp of terror, feeling positive, from the awful sensation of nothingness about the neck, that the entire collar has fallen off in the street. The tails are prairies, the pockets are caverns, and the back is one vast, illimitable, stretching waste. How Tom sidles along as close to the fence as he can scrape, and what a wary eye he keeps in every direction for other boys. When he forgets the school, he is half tempted to feel proud of his toga; but when he thinks of the boys, and the reception that awaits him, his heart sinks, and he is tempted to go back home, sneak up stairs, and rescue his worn old jacket from the rag-bag. He glances in terror at his distorted shadow on the fence, and, confident that it is a faithful outline of his figure, he knows that he has worn his father’s coat off by mistake. He tries various methods of buttoning his coat, to make it conform more harmoniously to his figure and his ideas of the eternal fitness of things. He buttons just the lower button, and immediately it flies all abroad at the shoulders, and he beholds himself an exaggerated mannikin of “Cap’n Cuttle.” Then he fastens just the upper button, and the frantic tails flap and flutter like a clothes-line in a cyclone. Then he buttons it all up, _a la militaire_, and tries to look soldierly, but the effect is so theological-studently that it frightens him until his heart stops beating. As he reaches the last friendly corner that shields him from the pitiless gaze of the boys he can hear howling and shrieking not fifty yards away, he pauses to give the final adjustment to the manly and unmanageable raiment. It is bigger and looser, flappier and wrinklier than ever. New and startling folds, and unexpected wrinkles, and uncontemplated bulges develop themselves, like masked batteries, just when and where their effect will be most demoralizing. And a new horror discloses itself at this trying and awful juncture. He wants to lie down on the sidewalk and try to die. For the first time he notices the color of his coat. Hideous! He has been duped, swindled, betrayed--made a monstrous idiot by that silver-tongued salesman, who has palmed off upon him a coat 2,000 years old; a coat that the most sweetly enthusiastic and terribly misinformed women’s missionary society would hesitate to offer a wild Hottentot; and which the most benighted, old-fashioned Hottentot that ever disdained clothes, would certainly blush to wear in the dark, and would probably decline with thanks. Oh madness! The color is no color. It is all colors. It is a brindle--a veritable, undeniable brindle. There must have been a fabulous amount of brindle cloth made up into boys’ first coats, sixteen or eighteen or nineteen years ago; because, out of 894--I like to be exact in the use of figures, because nothing else in the world lends such an air of profound truthfulness to a discourse--out of 894 boys I knew in their first tail-coat period, 893 came to school in brindle coats. And the other one--the 894th boy--made his wretched debut in a bottle-green toga, with dreadful glaring brass buttons. He left school very suddenly, and we always believed that the angels saw him in that coat, and ran away with him. But Tom, shivering with apprehension, and faint with mortification over the discovery of this new horror, gives one last despairing scrooch of his shoulders, to make the coat look shorter, and, with a final frantic tug at the tails, to make it appear longer, steps out from the protecting ægis of the corner, is stunned with a vocal hurricane of “Oh, what a coat!” and his cup of misery is as full as a rag-bag in three minutes.

Passing into the tail-coat period, Tom awakens to a knowledge of the broad physical truth, that he has hands. He is not very positive in his own mind how many. At times he is ready to swear to an even two; one pair; good hand. Again, when cruel fate and the non-appearance of some one else’s brother has compelled him to accompany his sister to a church sociable, he can see eleven; and as he sits bolt upright in the grimmest of straight-back chairs, plastered right up against the wall, as the “sociable” custom is, or used to be, trying to find enough unoccupied pockets in which to sequester all his hands, he is dimly conscious that hands should come in pairs, and vaguely wonders, if he has only five pair of regularly ordained hands, where this odd hand came from. And hitherto, Tom has been content to encase his feet in anything that would stay on them. Now, however, he has an eye for a glove-fitting boot, and learns to wreathe his face in smiles, hollow, heartless, deceitful smiles, while his boots are as full of agony as a broken heart, and his tortured feet cry out for vengeance upon the shoemaker, and make Tom feel that life is a hollow mockery and there is nothing real but soft corns and bunions.

And: His mother never cuts his hair again. Never. When Tom assumes the manly gown she has looked her last upon his head, with trimming ideas. His hair will be trimmed and clipped, barberously it may be, but she will not be acscissory before the fact. She may sometimes long to have her boy kneel down before her, while she gnaws around his terrified locks with a pair of scissors that were sharpened when they were made; and have since then cut acres of calico, and miles and miles of paper, and great stretches of cloth, and snarls and coils of string; and furlongs of lamp wick; and have snuffed candles; and dug refractory corks, out of the family ink bottle; and punched holes in skate straps; and trimmed the family nails; and have even done their level best, at the annual struggle, to cut stove-pipe lengths in two; and have successfully opened oyster and fruit cans; and pried up carpet tacks; and have many a time and oft gone snarlingly and toilsomely around Tom’s head, and made him an object of terror to the children in the street, and made him look so much like a yearling colt with the run of a bur pasture, that people have been afraid to approach him too suddenly, lest he should jump through his collar and run away.

He feels too, the dawning consciousness of another grand truth in the human economy. It dawns upon his deepening intelligence with the inherent strength and the unquestioned truth of a new revelation, that man’s upper lip was designed by nature for a mustache pasture. How tenderly reserved he is when he is brooding over this momentous discovery. With what exquisite caution and delicacy are his primal investigations conducted. In his microscopical researches, it appears to him that the down on his upper lip is certainly more determined down; more positive, more pronounced, more individual fuzz than that which vegetates in neglected tenderness upon his cheeks. He makes cautious explorations along the land of promise with the tip of his tenderest finger, delicately backing up the grade the wrong way, going always against the grain, that he may the more readily detect the slightest symptom of an uprising by the first feeling of velvety resistance. And day by day he is more and more firmly convinced that there is in his lip, the primordial germs, the protoplasm of a glory that will, in its full development, eclipse even the majesty and grandeur of his first tail-coat. And in the first dawning consciousness that the mustache is there, like the vote, and only needs to be brought out, how often Tom walks down to the barber-shop, gazes longingly in at the window, and walks past. And how often, when he musters up sufficient courage to go in, and climbs into the chair, and is just on the point of huskily whispering to the barber that he would like a shave, the entrance of a man with a beard like Frederick Barbarossa, frightens away his resolution, and he has his hair cut again. The third time that week, and it is so short that the barber has to hold it with his teeth while he files it off, and parts it with a straight edge and a scratch awl. Naturally, driven from the barber chair, Tom casts longing eyes upon the ancestral shaving machinery at home. And who shall say by what means he at length obtains possession of the paternal razor? No one. Nobody knows. Nobody ever did know. Even the searching investigation that always follows the paternal demand for the immediate extradition of whoever opened a fruit can with that razor, which always follows Tom’s first shave, is always, and ever will be, barren of results. All that we know about it is, that Tom holds the razor in his hand about a minute, wondering what to do with it, before the blade falls across his fingers and cuts every one of them. First blood claimed and allowed, for the razor. Then he straps the razor furiously. Or rather, he razors the strap. He slashes and cuts that passive implement in as many directions as he can make motions with the razor. He would cut it oftener if the strap lasted longer. Then he nicks the razor against the side of the mug. Then he drops it on the floor and steps on it and nicks it again. They are small nicks, not so large by half as a saw tooth, and he flatters himself his father will never see them. Then he soaks the razor in hot water, as he has seen his father do. Then he takes it out, at a temperature anywhere under 980° Fahrenheit, and lays it against his cheek, and raises a blister there the size of the razor, as he never saw his father do, but as his father most assuredly did, many, many years before Tom met him. Then he makes a variety of indescribable grimaces and labial contortions in a frenzied effort to get his upper lip into approachable shape, and at last, the first offer he makes at his embryo mustache, he slashes his nose with a vicious upper cut. He gashes the corners of his mouth; wherever those nicks touch his cheek they leave a scratch apiece, and he learns what a good nick in a razor is for, and at last when he lays the blood stained weapon down, his gory lip looks as though it had just come out of a long, stubborn, exciting contest with a straw cutter.

But he learns to shave, after a while--just before he cuts his lip clear off. He has to take quite a course of instruction, however, in that great school of experience about which the old philosopher had a remark to make. It is a grand old school; the only school at which men will study and learn, each for himself. One man’s experience never does another man any good; never did and never will teach another man anything. If the philosopher had said that it was a hard school, but that some men would learn at no other than this grand old school of experience, we might have inferred that all women, and most boys, and a few men were exempt from its hard teachings. But he used the more comprehensive term, if you remember what that is, and took us all in. We have all been there. There is no other school, in fact. Poor little Cain; dear, lonesome, wicked little Cain--I know it isn’t fashionable to pet him; I know it is popular to speak harshly and savagely about our eldest brother, when the fact is we resemble him more closely in disposition than any other member of the family--poor little Cain never knew the difference between his father’s sunburned nose and a glowing coal, until he had pulled the one and picked up the other. And Abel had to find out the difference in the same way, although he was told five hundred times, by his brother’s experience, that the coal would burn him and the nose wouldn’t. And Cain’s boy wouldn’t believe that fire was any hotter than an icicle, until he made a digital experiment, and understood why they called it fire. And so Enoch and Methusaleh, and Moses, and Daniel, and Solomon, and Cæsar, and Napoleon, and Washington, and the President, and the Governor, and the Mayor, and you and I have all of us, at one time or another, in one way or another, burned our fingers at the same old fires that have scorched human fingers in the same monotonous old ways, at the same reliable old stands, for the past 6,000 years; and all the verbal instruction between here and the silent grave couldn’t teach us so much, or teach it so thoroughly, as one well directed singe. And a million of years from now--if this weary old world may endure so long--when human knowledge shall fall a little short of the infinite, and all the lore and erudition of this wonderful age will be but the primer of that day of light--the baby that is born into that world of knowledge and wisdom and progress, rich with all the years of human experience, will cry for the lamp, and, the very first time that opportunity favors it, will try to pull the flame up by the roots, and will know just as much as ignorant, untaught, stupid little Cain knew on the same subject. Year after year, century after unfolding century, how true it is that the lion on the fence is always bigger, fiercer, and more given to majestic attitudes and dramatic situations than the lion in the tent. And yet it costs us, often as the circus comes around, fifty cents to find that out.

But while we have been moralizing, Tom’s mustache has taken a start. It has attained the physical density, though not the color, by any means, of the Egyptian darkness--it can be felt; and it is felt; very soft felt. The world begins to take notice of the new-comer; and Tom, as generations of Toms before him have done, patiently endures dark hints from other members of the family about his face being dirty. He loftily ignores his experienced father’s suggestions that he should perform his tonsorial toilet with a spoonful of cream and the family cat. When his sisters, in meekly dissembled ignorance and innocence, inquire, “Tom, what _have_ you on your lip?” he is austere, as becomes a man annoyed by the frivolous small talk of women. And when his younger brother takes advantage of the presence of a numerous company in the house, to shriek over the baluster up stairs, apparently to any boy anywhere this side of China, “Tom’s a raisin’ mustashers!” Tom smiles, a wan, neglected-orphan smile; a smile that looks as though it had come up on his face to weep over the barrenness of the land; a perfect ghost of a smile, as compared with the rugged 7 × 9 smiles that play like animated crescents over the countenances of the company. But the mustache grows. It comes on apace; very short in the middle, very no longer at the ends, and very blonde all round. Whenever you see such a mustache, do not laugh at it; do not point at it the slow, unmoving finger of scorn. Encourage it; speak kindly of it; affect admiration for it; coax it along. Pray for it--for it is a first. They always come that way. And when, in the fullness of time, it has developed so far that it can be pulled, there is all the agony of making it take color. It is worse, and more obstinate, and more deliberate than a meerschaum. The sun, that tans Tom’s cheeks and blisters his nose, only bleaches his mustache. Nothing ever hastens its color; nothing does it any permanent good; nothing but patience, and faith, and persistent pulling.

With all the comedy there is about it, however, this is the grand period of a boy’s life. You look at them, with their careless, easy, natural manners and movements in the streets and on the base ball ground, and their marvelous, systematic, indescribable, inimitable and complex awkwardness in your parlors, and do you never dream, looking at these young fellows, of the overshadowing destinies awaiting them, the mighty struggles mapped out in the earnest future of their lives, the thrilling conquests in the world of arms, the grander triumphs in the realm of philosophy, the fadeless laurels in the empire of letters, and the imperishable crowns that he who giveth them the victory binds about their brows, that wait for the courage and ambition of these boys? Why, the world is at a boy’s feet; and power and conquest and leadership slumber in his rugged arms and care-free heart. A boy sets his ambition at whatever mark he will--lofty or groveling, as he may elect--and the boy who resolutely sets his heart on fame, on wealth, on power, on what he will; who consecrates himself to a life of noble endeavor, and lofty effort; who concentrates every faculty of his mind and body on the attainment of his one darling point; who brings to support his ambition courage and industry and patience, can trample on genius; for these are better and grander than genius; and he will begin to rise above his fellows as steadily and as surely as the sun climbs above the mountains. Hannibal, standing before the Punic altar fires and in the lisping accents of childhood swearing eternal hatred to Rome, was the Hannibal at twenty-four years commanding the army that swept down upon Italy like a mountain torrent, and shook the power of the mistress of the world, bid her defiance at her own gates, while affrighted Rome huddled and cowered under the protecting shadows of her walls. Napoleon, building snow forts at school and planning mimic battles with his playfellows, was the lieutenant of artillery at sixteen years, general of artillery and the victor of Toulon at twenty-four, and at last Emperor--not by the paltry accident of birth which might happen to any man, however unworthy, but by the manhood and grace of his own right arm, and his own brain, and his own courage and dauntless ambition--Emperor, with his foot on the throat of prostrate Europe. Alexander, daring more in his boyhood than his warlike father could teach him, and entering upon his all conquering career at twenty-four, was the boy whose vaulting ambition only paused in its dazzling flight when the world lay at his feet. And the fair-faced soldiers of the Empire, they who rode down upon the bayonets of the English squares at Waterloo, when the earth rocked beneath their feet and the incense smoke from the altars of the battle god shut out the sun and sky above their heads, who, with their young lives streaming from their gaping wounds, opened their pallid lips to cry, “Vive L’Empereur,” as they died for honor and France, were boys--schoolboys--the boy conscripts of France, torn from their homes and their schools to stay the failing fortunes of the last grand army and the Empire that was tottering to its fall. You don’t know how soon these happy-go-lucky young fellows, making summer hideous with base ball slang, or gliding around a skating rink on their backs, may hold the state and its destinies in their grasp; you don’t know how soon these boys may make and write the history of the hour; how soon they alone may shape events and guide the current of public action; how soon one of them may run away with your daughter or borrow money of you.

Certain it is, there is one thing Tom will do, just about this period of his existence. He will fall in love with somebody before his mustache is long enough to wax.

Perhaps one of the earliest indications of this event, for it does not always break out in the same manner, is a sudden and alarming increase in the number and variety of Tom’s neckties. In his boxes and on his dressing case, his mother is constantly startled by the changing and increasing assortment of the display. Monday he encircles his tender throat with a lilac knot, fearfully and wonderfully tied. A lavender tie succeeds the following day. Wednesday is graced with a sweet little tangle of pale, pale blue, that fades at a breath; Thursday is ushered in with a scarf of delicate pea green, of wonderful convolutions and sufficiently expansive, by the aid of a clean collar, to conceal any little irregularity in Tom’s wash day; Friday smiles on a sailor’s knot of dark blue, with a tangle of dainty forget-me-nots embroidered over it: Saturday tones itself down to a quiet, unobtrusive, neutral tint or shade, scarlet or yellow, and Sunday is deeply, darkly, piously black. It is difficult to tell whether Tom is trying to express the state of his distracted feelings by his neckties, or trying to find a color that will harmonize with his mustache, or match Laura’s dress.

And during the variegated necktie period of man’s existence how tenderly that mustache is coaxed and petted and caressed. How it is brushed to make it lie down and waxed to make it stand out, and how he notes its slow growth, and weeps and mourns and prays and swears over it day after weary day. And now, if ever, and generally now, he buys things to make it take color. But he never repeats this offense against nature. He buys a wonderful dye, warranted to “produce a beautiful glossy black or brown at one application, without stain or injury to the skin.” Buys it at a little shabby, round the corner, obscure drug store, because he is not known there. And he tells the assassin who sells it him, that he is buying it for a sick sister. And the assassin knows that he lies. And in the guilty silence and solitude of his own room, with the curtains drawn and the door locked, Tom tries the virtues of that magic dye. It gets on his fingers and turns them black, to the elbow. It burns holes in his handkerchief when he tries to rub the malignant poison off his ebony fingers. He applies it to his silky mustache, real camel’s hair, very cautiously and very tenderly, and with some misgivings. It turns his lip so black it makes the room dark. And out of all the clouds and the darkness and the sable splotches that pall every thing else in Plutonian gloom, that mustache smiles out, grinning like some ghastly hirsute specter, gleaming like the moon through a rifted storm cloud, unstained, untainted, unshaded; a natural, incorruptible blonde. That is the last time anybody fools Tom on hair dye.

The eye he has for immaculate linen and faultless collars. How it amazes his mother and sisters to learn that there isn’t a shirt in the house fit for a pig to wear, and that he wouldn’t wear the best collar in his room to be hanged in.

And the boots he crowds his feet into! A Sunday-school room, the Sunday before the picnic or the Christmas tree, with its sudden influx of new scholars, with irreproachable morals and ambitious appetites, doesn’t compare with the overcrowded condition of those boots. Too tight in the instep; too narrow at the toes; too short at both ends; the only things about those boots that don’t hurt him, that don’t fill his very soul with agony, are the straps. When Tom is pulling them on, he feels that if somebody would kindly run over him three or four times, with a freight train, the sensation would be pleasant and reassuring and tranquilizing. The air turns black before his starting eyes, there is a roaring like the rush of many waters in his ears, he tugs at the straps that are cutting his fingers in two and pulling his arms out by the roots, and just before his blood-shot eyes shoot clear out of his head, the boot comes on--or the straps pull off. Then when he stands up, the earth rocks beneath his feet, and he thinks he can faintly hear the angels calling him home. And when he walks across the floor the first time his standing in the church and the Christian community is ruined forever. Or would be if any one could hear what he says. He never, never, never gets to be so old that he can not remember those boots, and if it is seventy years afterward his feet curl up in agony at the recollection. The first time he wears them, he is vaguely aware, as he leaves his room that there is a kind of “fixy” look about him, and his sisters’ tittering is not needed to confirm this impression. He has a certain, half-defined impression that every thing he has on is a size too small for any other man of his size. That his boots are a trifle snug, like a house with four rooms for a family of thirty-seven. That the hat which sits so lightly on the crown of his head is jaunty but limited, like a junior clerk’s salary; that his gloves are a neat fit, and can’t be buttoned with a stump machine. Tom doesn’t know all this: he has only a general, vague impression that it may be so. And he doesn’t know that his sisters know every line of it. For he has lived many years longer, and got in ever so much more trouble, before he learns that one bright, good, sensible girl--and I believe they are all that--will see and notice more in a glance, remember it more accurately, and talk more about it, than twenty men can see in a week. Tom does not know, for his crying feet will not let him, how he gets from his room to the earthly paradise where Laura lives. Nor does he know, after he gets there, that Laura sees him trying to rest one foot by setting it up on the heel. And she sees him sneak it back under his chair and tilt it up on the toe for a change. She sees him ease the other foot a little by tugging the heel of the boot at the leg of the chair. A hazardous, reckless, presumptuous experiment. Tom tries it so far one night, and slides his heel so far up the leg of his boot, that his foot actually feels comfortable, and he thinks the angels must be rubbing it. He walks out of the parlor sideways that night, trying to hide the cause of the sudden elongation of one leg, and he hobbles all the way home in the same disjointed condition. But Laura sees that too. She sees all the little knobs and lumps on his foot, and sees him fidget and fuss, she sees the look of anguish flitting across his face under the heartless, deceitful, veneering of smiles, and she makes the mental remark that master Tom would feel much happier, and much more comfortable, and more like staying longer, if he had worn his father’s boots.

But on his way to the house, despite the distraction of his crying feet, how many pleasant, really beautiful, romantic things Tom thinks up and recollects and compiles and composes to say to Laura, to impress her with his originality, and wisdom, and genius, and bright exuberant fancy and general superiority over all the rest of Tom kind. Real earnest things, you know; no hollow, conventional compliments, or nonsense, but such things, Tom flatters himself, as none of the other fellows can or will say. And he has them all in beautiful order when he gets at the foot of the hill. The remark about the weather, to begin with; not the stereotyped old phrase, but a quaint, droll, humorous conceit that no one in the world but Tom could think of. Then, after the opening overture about the weather, something about music and Beethoven’s sonata in B flat, and Haydn’s symphonies, and of course something about Beethoven’s grand old Fifth symphony, somebody’s else mass, in heaven knows how many flats; and then something about art, and a profound thought or two on science and philosophy, and so on to poetry and from poetry to “business.”

But alas, when Tom reaches the gate, all these well ordered ideas display evident symptoms of breaking up; as he crosses the yard, he is dismayed to know that they are in the convulsions of a panic, and when he touches the bell knob, every, each, all and several of the ideas, original and compiled, that he has had on any subject during the past ten years, forsake him and return no more that evening. When Laura opened the door he had intended to say something real splendid about the imprisoned sunlight of something, beaming out a welcome upon the what you may call it of the night or something. Instead of which he says, or rather gasps: “Oh, yes, to be sure; to be sure; ho.” And then, conscious that he has not said anything particularly brilliant or original, or that most any of the other fellows could not say with a little practice, he makes one more effort to redeem himself before he steps into the hall, and adds, “Oh, good morning; good morning.” Feeling that even this is only a partial success, he collects his scattered faculties for one united effort and inquires: “How is your mother?” And then it strikes him that he has about exhausted the subject, and he goes into the parlor, and sits down, and just as soon as he has placed his reproachful feet in the least agonizing position, he proceeds to wholly, completely and successfully forget everything he ever knew in his life. He returns to consciousness to find himself, to his own amazement and equally to Laura’s bewilderment, conducting a conversation about the crops, and a new method of funding the national debt, subjects upon which he is about as well informed as the town clock. He rallies, and makes a successful effort to turn the conversation into literary channels by asking her if she has read “Daniel Deronda,” and wasn’t it odd that George Washington Eliot should name her heroine “Grenadine,” after a dress pattern? And in a burst of confidence he assures her that he would not be amazed if it should rain before morning, (and he hopes it will, and that it may be a flood, and that he may get caught in it, without an ark nearer than Cape Horn.) And so, at last, the first evening passes away, and after mature deliberation and many unsuccessful efforts he rises to go. But he does not go. He wants to; but he doesn’t know how. He says good evening. Then he repeats it in a marginal reference. Then he puts it in a foot note. Then he adds the remark in an appendix, and shakes hands. By this time he gets as far as the parlor door, and catches hold of the knob and holds on to it as tightly as though some one on the other side were trying to pull it through the door and run away with it. And he stands there a fidgetty statue of the door holder. He mentions, for not more than the twentieth time that evening that he is passionately fond of music but he can’t sing. Which is a lie; he can. Did she go to the Centennial? “No.” “Such a pity”--he begins, but stops in terror, lest she may consider his condolence a reflection upon her financial standing. Did he go? Oh, yes; yes; he says, absently, he went. Or, that is to say, no, not exactly. He did not exactly go to the Centennial; he staid at home. In fact, he had not been out of town this Summer. Then he looks at the tender little face; he looks at the brown eyes, sparkling with suppressed merriment; he looks at the white hands, dimpled and soft, twin daughters of the snow; and the fairy picture grows more lovely as he looks at it, until his heart outruns his fears; he must speak, he must say something impressive and ripe with meaning, for how can he go away with this suspense in his breast? His heart trembles as does his hand; his quivering lips part, and--Laura deftly hides a vagrom yawn behind her fan. Good night, and Tom is gone.

There is a dejected droop to the mustache that night, when in the solitude of his own room Tom releases his hands from the despotic gloves, and tenderly soothes two of the reddest, puffiest feet that ever crept out of boots not half their own size, and swore in mute, but eloquent anatomical profanity at the whole race of bootmakers. And his heart is nearly as full of sorrow and bitterness as his boots. It appears to him that he showed off to the worst possible advantage; he is dimly conscious that he acted very like a donkey, and he has the not entirely unnatural impression that she will never want to see him again. And so he philosophically and manfully makes up his mind never, never, never, to think of her again. And then he immediately proceeds, in the manliest and most natural way in the world, to think of nothing and nobody else under the sun for the next ten hours. How the tender little face does haunt him. He pitches himself into bed with an aimless recklessness that tumbles pillows, bolster, and sheets into one shapeless, wild, chaotic mass, and he goes through the motions of going to sleep, like a man who would go to sleep by steam. He stands his pillow up on end, and pounds it into a wad, and he props his head upon it as though it were the guillotine block. He lays it down and smooths it out level, and pats all the wrinkles out of it, and there is more sleeplessness in it to the square inch than there is in the hungriest mosquito that ever sampled a martyr’s blood. He gets up and smokes like a patent stove, although not three hours ago he told Laura that he de-tes-ted tobacco.

This is the only time Tom will ever go through this, in exactly this way. It is the one rare golden experience, the one bright, rosy dream of his life. He may live to be as old as an army overcoat, and he may marry as many wives as Brigham Young, singly, or in a cluster, but this will come to him but once. Let him enjoy all the delightful misery, all the ecstatic wretchedness, all the heavenly forlornness of it as best he can. And he does take good, solid, edifying misery out of it. How he does torture himself and hate Smith, the empty headed donkey, who can talk faster than poor Tom can think, and whose mustache is black as Tom’s boots, and so long that he can pull one end of it with both hands. And how he does detest that idiot Brown, who plays and sings, and goes up there every time Tom does, and claws over a few old forgotten five-finger exercises and calls it music; who comes up there, some night when Tom thinks he has the evening and Laura all to himself, and brings up an old, tuneless, voiceless, cracked guitar, and goes crawling around in the wet grass under the windows and makes night perfectly hideous with what he calls a serenade. And he speaks French, too, the beast. Poor Tom; when Brown’s lingual accomplishments in the language of Charlemagne are confined to--“aw--aw--er ah--vooly voo?” and on state occasions to the additional grandeur of “avy voo mong shapo?” But poor Tom who once covered himself with confusion by telling Laura that his favorite in “Robert le Diable” was the beautiful aria, “Robert toy que jam,” considers Brown a very prodigal in linguistic attainments; another Cardinal Mezzofanti; and hates him for it accordingly. And he hates Daubs, the artist, too, who was up there one evening and made an off hand crayon sketch of her in an album. The picture looked much more like Daubs’ mother, and Tom knew it, but Laura said it was oh just delightfully, perfectly splendid, and Tom has hated Daubs most cordially ever since. In fact, Tom hates every man who has the temerity to speak to her, or whom she may treat with lady-like courtesy. Until there comes one night when the boots of the inquisition pattern sit more lightly on their suffering victims. When Providence has been on Tom’s side and has kept Smith and Daubs and Brown away, and has frightened Tom nearly to death by showing him no one in the little parlor with its old-fashioned furniture but himself and Laura and the furniture. When, almost without knowing how or why, they talk about life and its realities instead of the last concert or the next lecture; when they talk of their plans, and their day dreams and aspirations, and their ideals of real men and women; when they talk about the heroes and heroines of days long gone by, grey and dim in the ages that are ever made young and new by the lives of noble men and noble women who lived, and did, and never died in those grand old days, but lived and live on, as imperishable and fadeless in their glory as the glittering stars that sang at creation’s dawn. When the room seems strangely silent when their voices hush; when the flush of earnestness upon her face gives it a tinge of sadness that makes it more beautiful than ever; when the dream and picture of a home Eden, and home life, and home love, grows every moment more lovely, more entrancing to him until at last poor blundering, stupid Tom, speaks without knowing what he is going to say, speaks without preparation or rehearsal, speaks, and his honest, natural, manly heart touches his faltering lips with eloquence and tenderness and earnestness that all the rhetoric in the world never did and never will inspire, and----. That is all we know about it. Nobody knows what is said or how it is done. Nobody. Only the silent stars or the whispering leaves, or the cat, or maybe Laura’s younger brother, or the hired girl, who generally bulges in just as Tom reaches the climax. All the rest of us know about it is, that Tom doesn’t come away so early that night, and that when he reaches the door he holds a pair of dimpled hands instead of the insensate door knob. He never clings to that door knob again; never. Unless ma, dear ma, has been so kind as to bring in her sewing and spend the evening with them. And Tom doesn’t hate anybody, nor want to kill anybody in the wide, wide world, and he feels just as good as though he had just come out of a six months’ revival; and is happy enough to borrow money of his worst enemy.

But, there is no rose without a thorn. Although, I suppose, on an inside computation, there is, in this weary old world as much as, say a peck, or a peck and a half possibly, of thorns without their attendant roses. Just the raw, bare thorns. In the highest heaven of his newly found bliss, Tom is suddenly recalled to earth and its miseries by a question from Laura which falls like a plummet into the unrippled sea of the young man’s happiness, and fathoms its depths in the shallowest place. “Has her own Tom”--as distinguished from countless other Toms, nobody’s Toms, unclaimed Toms, to all intents and purposes swamp lands on the public matrimonial domain--“Has her own Tom said anything to pa?” “Oh, yes! pa;” Tom says, “To be sure; yes.” Grim, heavy browed, austere pa. The living embodiment of business. Wiry, shrewd, the life and mainspring of the house of Tare and Tret. “’M. Well. N’ no,” Tom had not exactly, as you might say, poured out his heart to pa. Somehow or other he had a rose-colored idea that the thing was going to go right along in this way forever. Tom had an idea that the programme was all arranged, printed and distributed, rose-colored, gilt-edged, and perfumed. He was going to sit and hold Laura’s hands, pa was to stay down at the office, and ma was to make her visits to the parlor as much like angels’, for their rarity and brevity, as possible. But he sees, now that the matter has been referred to, that it is a grim necessity. And Laura doesn’t like to see such a spasm of terror pass over Tom’s face; and her coral lips quiver a little as she hides her flushed face out of sight on Tom’s shoulder, and tells him how kind and tender pa has always been with her, until Tom feels positively jealous of pa. And she tells him that he must not dread going to see him, for pa will be oh so glad to know how happy, happy, happy he can make his little girl. And as she talks of him, the hard working, old-fashioned, tender-hearted old man, who loves his girls as though he were yet only a big boy, her heart grows tenderer, and she speaks so earnestly and eloquently that Tom, at first savagely jealous of him, is persuaded to fall in love with the old gentleman--he calls him “Pa,” too, now,--himself.

But by the following afternoon this feeling is very faint. And when he enters the counting room of Tare & Tret, and stands before pa--Oh, land of love, how could Laura ever talk so about such a man. Stubbly little pa; with a fringe of the most obstinate and wiry gray hair standing all around his bald, bald head; the wiriest, grizzliest mustache bristling under his nose; a tuft of tangled beard under the sharp chin, and a raspy undergrowth of a week’s run on the thin jaws; business, business, business, in every line of the hard, seamed face, and profit and loss, barter and trade, dicker and bargain, in every movement of the nervous hands. Pa; old business! He puts down the newspaper a little way, and looks over the top of it as Tom announces himself, glancing at the young man with a pair of blue eyes that peer through old-fashioned iron-bowed spectacles, that look as though they had known these eyes and done business with them ever since they wept over their A B C’s or peeped into the tall stone jar Sunday afternoon to look for the doughnuts.

Tom, who had felt all along there could be no inspiration on his part in this scene, has come prepared. At least he had his last true statement at his tongue’s end when he entered the counting room. But now, it seems to him that if he had been brought up in a circus, and cradled inside of a sawdust ring, and all his life trained to twirl his hat, he couldn’t do it better, nor faster, nor be more utterly incapable of doing anything else. At last he swallows a lump in his throat as big as a ballot box, and faintly gasps, “Good morning.” Mr. Tret hastens to recognize him. “Eh? oh; yes; yes; yes; I see; young Bostwick, from Dope & Middlerib’s. Oh yes. Well--?” “I have come, sir,” gasps Tom, thinking all around the world from Cook’s explorations to “Captain Riley’s Narrative,” for the first line of that speech that Tare & Tret have just scared out of him so completely that he doesn’t believe he ever knew a word of it. “I have come--” and he thinks if his lips didn’t get so dry and hot they make his teeth ache, that he could get along with it; “I have, sir,--come, Mr. Tret; Mr. Tret, sir--I have come--I am come--” “Yes, ye-es,” says Mr. Tret, in the wildest bewilderment, but in no very encouraging tones, thinking the young man probably wants to borrow money; “Ye-es; I see you’ve come. Well; that’s all right; glad to see you. Yes, you’ve come?” Tom’s hat is now making about nine hundred and eighty revolutions per minute, and apparently not running up to half its full capacity. “Sir; Mr. Tret,” he resumes, “I have come, sir; Mr. Tret--I am here to--to sue--to sue, Mr. Tret--I am here to sue--” “Sue, eh?” the old man echoes sharply, with a belligerent rustle of the newspaper; “sue Tare & Tret, eh? Well, that’s right, young man; that’s right. Sue, and get damages. We’ll give you all the law you want.” Tom’s head is so hot, and his heart is so cold, that he thinks they must be about a thousand miles apart. “Sir,” he explains, “that isn’t it. It isn’t that. I only want to ask--I have long known--Sir,” he adds, as the opening lines of his speech come to him like a message from heaven, “Sir, you have a flower, a tender lovely blossom; chaste as the snow that crowns the mountain’s brow; fresh as the breath of morn; lovelier than the rosy-fingered hours that fly before Aurora’s car; pure as the lily kissed by dew. This precious blossom, watched by your paternal eyes, the object of your tender care and solicitude, I ask of you. I would wear it in my heart, and guard and cherish it--and in the--” “Oh-h, ye-es, yes, yes,” the old man says soothingly, beginning to see that Tom is only drunk, “Oh yes, yes, I don’t know much about them myself; my wife and the girls generally keep half the windows in the house littered up with them, Winter and Summer, every window so full of house plants the sun can’t shine in. Come up to the house, they’ll give you all you can carry away, give you a hat full of ’em.” “No, no, no; you don’t understand,” says poor Tom, and old Mr. Tret now observes that Tom is very drunk indeed. “It isn’t that, sir. Sir, that isn’t it. I--I--I want to marry your daughter!” And there it is at last, as bluntly as though Tom had wadded it into a gun and shot it at the old man. Mr. Tret does not say any thing for twenty seconds. Tom tells Laura that evening that it was two hours and a half before her father opened his head. Then he says, “Oh, yes, yes, yes, yes; to be sure; to--be--sure.” And then the long pause is dreadful. “Yes, yes. Well, I don’t know. I don’t know about that, young man. Said any thing to Jennie about it?” “It isn’t Jennie,” Tom gasps, seeing a new Rubicon to cross; “its----” “Oh, Julie, eh? well, I don’t----” “No, sir,” interjects the despairing Tom, “it isn’t Julie, it’s----” “Sophie, eh? Oh, well, Sophie----” “Sir,” says Tom, “If you please, sir, it isn’t Sophie, its----” “Not Minnie, surely? Why, Minnie is hardly--well, I don’t know. Young folks get along faster than----” “Dear Mr. Tret,” breaks in the distracted lover, “it’s Laura.”

As they sit and stand there, looking at each other, the dingy old counting room, with the heavy shadows lurking in every corner, with its time-worn, heavy brown furnishings, with the scanty dash of sunlight breaking in through the dusty window, looks like an old Rubens painting; the beginning and the finishing of a race: the old man, nearly ready to lay his armor off, glad to be so nearly and so safely through with the race and the fight that Tom, in all his inexperience and with all the rash enthusiasm and conceit of a young man, is just getting ready to run and fight, or fight and run, you never can tell which until he is through with it. And the old man, looking at Tom, and through him, and past him, feels his old heart throb almost as quickly as does that of the young man before him. For looking down a long vista of happy, eventful years, bordered with roseate hopes and bright dreams and anticipations, he sees a tender face, radiant with smiles and kindled with blushes; he feels a soft hand drop into his own with its timid pressure; he sees the vision open, under the glittering summer stars, down mossy hillsides, where the restless breezes, sighing through the rustling leaves, whispered their tender secret to the noisy katydids; strolling along the winding paths, deep in the bending wild grass, down in the star-lit aisles of the dim old woods; loitering where the meadow brook sparkles over the white pebbles or murmurs around the great flat stepping-stones; lingering on the rustic foot-bridge, while he gazes into eyes eloquent and tender in their silent love-light; up through the long pathway of years, flecked and checkered with sunshine and cloud, with storm and calm, through years of struggle, trial, sorrow, disappointment, out at last into the grand, glorious, crowning beauty and benison of hard-won and well-deserved success, until he sees now this second Laura, re-imaging her mother as she was in the dear old days. And he rouses from his dream with a start, and he tells Tom he’ll “Talk it over with Mrs. Tret, and see him again in the morning.”

And so they are duly and formally engaged; and the very first thing they do, they make the very sensible, though very uncommon, resolution to so conduct themselves that no one will ever suspect it. And they succeed admirably. No one ever does suspect it. They come into church in time to hear the benediction--every time they come together. They shun all other people when church is dismissed, and are seen to go home alone the longest way. At picnics they are missed not more than fifty times a day, and are discovered sitting under a tree, holding each other’s hands, gazing into each other’s eyes and saying--nothing. When he throws her shawl over her shoulders, he never looks at what he is doing, but looks straight into her starry eyes, throws the shawl right over her natural curls, and drags them out by the hairpins. If, at sociable or festival, they are left alone in a dressing-room a second and a half, Laura emerges with her ruffle standing around like a railroad accident; and Tom has enough complexion on his shoulder to go around a young ladies’ seminary. When they drive out, they sit in a buggy with a seat eighteen inches wide, and there is two feet of unoccupied room at either end of it. Long years afterward, when they drive, a street car isn’t too wide for them; and when they walk, you could drive four loads of hay between them.

And yet, as carefully as they guard their precious little secret, and as cautious and circumspect as they are in their walk and behavior, it gets talked around that they are engaged. People are so prying and suspicious.

And so the months of their engagement run on; never before, or since, time flies so swiftly--unless, it may be, some time when Tom has an acceptance in bank to meet in two days, that he can’t lift one end of--and the wedding day dawns, fades, and the wedding is over. Over, with its little circle of delighted friends, with its ripples of pleasure and excitement, with its touches of home love and home life, that leave their lasting impress upon Laura’s heart, although Tom, with man-like blindness, never sees one of them. Over, with ma, with the thousand and one anxieties attendant on the grand event in her daughter’s life hidden away under her dear old smiling face, down, away down under the tender, glistening eyes, deep in the loving heart; ma, hurrying here and fluttering there, in the intense excitement of something strangely made up of happiness and grief, of apprehension and hope; ma, with her sudden disappearances and flushed reappearances, indicating struggles and triumphs in the turbulent world down stairs; ma, with the new-fangled belt, with the dinner-plate buckles, fastened on wrong side foremost, and the flowers dangling down the wrong side of her head, to Sophie’s intense horror and pantomimic telegraphy; ma, flying here and there, seeing that every thing is going right, from kitchen to dressing-rooms; looking after everything and everybody, with her hands and heart just as full as they will hold, and more voices calling “ma,” from every room in the house, than you would think one hundred mas could answer. But she answers them all, and she sees after everything, and just in the nick of time prevents Mr. Tret from going down stairs and attending the ceremony in a loud-figured dressing-gown and green slippers; ma, who, with the quivering lip and glistening eyes, has to be cheerful, and lively, and smiling; because, if, as she thinks of the dearest and best of her flock going away from her fold, to put her life and her happiness into another’s keeping, she gives way for one moment, a dozen reproachful voices cry out, “Oh-h ma!” How it all comes back to Laura, like the tender shadows of a dream, long years after the dear, dear face, furrowed with marks of patient suffering and loving care, rests under the snow and the daisies; when the mother-love that glistened in the tender eyes has closed in darkness on the dear old home; and the nerveless hands, crossed in dreamless sleep upon the pulseless breast, can never again touch the children’s heads with caressing gesture; how the sweet vision comes to Laura, as it shone on her wedding morn, rising in tenderer beauty through the blinding tears her own excess of happiness calls up, as the rainbow spans the cloud only through the mingling of the golden sunshine and the falling rain.

And pa, dear old shabby pa, whose clothes will not fit him as they fit other men; who always dresses just a year and a half behind the style; pa, wandering up and down through the house, as though he were lost in his own home, pacing through the hall like a sentinel, blundering aimlessly and listlessly into rooms where he has no business, and being repelled therefrom by a chorus of piercing shrieks and hysterical giggling; pa, getting off his well worn jokes with an assumption of merriment that seems positively real; pa, who creeps away by himself once in a while, and leans his face against the window, and sighs, in direct violation of all strict household regulations, right against the glass, as he thinks of his little girl going away to-day from the home whose love and tenderness and patience she has known so well. Only yesterday, it seems, to him, the little baby girl, bringing the first music of baby prattle into his home; then a little girl in short dresses, with school-girl troubles and school-girl pleasures; then an older little girl, out of school and into society, but a little girl to pa still. And then----. But, somehow, this is as far as pa can get; for he sees, in the flight of this, the first, the following flight of the other fledglings; and he thinks how silent and desolate the old nest will be when they have all mated and flown away. He thinks, when their flight shall have made other homes bright and cheery and sparkling, with music and prattle and laughter, how it will leave the old home hushed and quiet and still. How, in the long, lonesome afternoons, mother will sit by the empty cradle that rocked them all, murmuring the sweet old cradle songs that brooded over all their sleep, until the rising tears check the swaying cradle and choke the song--and back, over river and prairie and mountain, that roll and stretch and rise between the old home and the new ones, comes back the prattle of her little ones, the rippling music of their laughter, the tender cadences of their songs, until the hushed old home is haunted by memories of its children--gray and old they may be, with other children clustering about their knees; but to the dear old home they are “the children” still. And dreaming thus, when pa for a moment finds his little girl alone--his little girl who is going away out of the home whose love she knows, into a home whose tenderness and patience are all untried--he holds her in his arms and whispers the most fervent blessing that ever throbbed from a father’s heart; and Laura’s wedding day would be incomplete and unfeeling without her tears. So is the pattern of our life made up of smiles and tears, shadow and sunshine. Tom sees none of these background pictures of the wedding day. He sees none of its real, heartfelt earnestness. He sees only the bright, sunny tints and happy figures that the tearful, shaded background throws out in golden relief; but never stops to think that, without the shadows, the clouds, and the somber tints of the background, the picture would be flat, pale, and lusterless.

And then, the presents. The assortment of brackets, serviceable, ornamental and--cheap. The French clock, that never went, that does not go, that never will go. And the nine potato mashers. The eight mustard spoons. The three cigar stands. Eleven match safes; assorted patterns. A dozen tidies, charity fair styles, blue dog on a yellow background, barking at a green boy climbing over a red fence, after seal brown apples. The two churns, old pattern, straight handle and dasher, and they have as much thought of keeping a cow as they have of keeping a section of artillery. Five things they didn’t know the names of, and never could find any body who could tell what they were for. And a nickel plated pocket corkscrew, that Tom, in a fine burst of indignation, throws out of the window, which Laura says is just like her own impulsive Tom. And not long after her own impulsive Tom catches his death of cold and ruins the knees of his best trowsers crawling around in the wet grass hunting for that same corkscrew. Which is also just like her own impulsive Tom.

And then, the young people go to work and buy e-v-e-r-y thing they need, the day they go to housekeeping. Every thing. Just as well, Tom says, to get every thing at once and have it delivered right up at the house, as to spend five or six or ten or twenty years in stocking up a house, as his father did. And Laura thinks so too, and she wonders that Tom should know so much more than his father. This worries Tom himself, when he thinks of it, and he never rightly understands how it is, until he is forty-five or fifty years old and has a Tom of his own to direct and advise him. So they make out a list, and revise it, and rewrite it, until they have every thing down, complete, and it isn’t until supper is ready the first day, that they discover there isn’t a knife, a fork, or a plate or a spoon in the new house. And the first day the washerwoman comes, and the water is hot, and the clothes are all ready, it is discovered that there isn’t a wash-tub nearer than the grocery. And further along in the day the discovery is made that while Tom has bought a clothes-line that will reach to the north pole and back, and then has to be coiled up a mile or two in the back yard, there isn’t a clothes-pin in the settlement. And in the course of a week or two, Tom slowly awakens to the realization of the fact that he has only begun to get. And if he should live two thousand years, which he rarely does, and possibly may not, he would think, just before he died, of something they had wanted the worst way for five centuries, and had either been too poor to get, or Tom had always forgotten to bring up. So long as he lives, Tom goes on bringing home things that they need--absolute, simple necessities, that were never so much as hinted at in that exhaustive list. And old Time comes along, and knowing that the man in that new house will never get through bringing things up to it, helps him out and comes around and brings things, too. Brings a gray hair now and then, to stick in Tom’s mustache, which has grown too big to be ornamental, and too wayward and unmanageable to be comfortable. He brings little cares and little troubles, and little trials and little butcher bills, and little grocer’s bills, and little tailor bills, and nice large millinery bills, that pluck at Tom’s mustache and stroke it the wrong way and make it look more and more as pa’s did the first time Tom saw it. He brings, by and by, the prints of baby fingers and pats them around on the dainty wall paper. Brings, some times, a voiceless messenger that lays its icy fingers on the baby lips, and hushes their dainty prattle, and in the baptism of its first sorrow, the darkened little home has its dearest and tenderest tie to the upper fold. Brings, by and by, the tracks of a boy’s muddy boots, and scatters them all up and down the clean porch. Brings a messenger, one day, to take the younger Tom away to college. And the quiet the boy leaves behind him is so much harder to endure than his racket, that old Tom is tempted to keep a brass band in the house until the boy comes back. But old Time brings him home at last, and it does make life seem terribly real and earnest to Tom, and how the old laugh rings out and ripples all over Laura’s face, when they see old Tom’s first mustache budding and struggling into second life on young Tom’s face.

And still old Time comes round, bringing each year whiter frosts to scatter on the whitening mustache, and brighter gleams of silver to glint the brown of Laura’s hair. Bringing the blessings of peaceful old age and a lovelocked home to crown these noble, earnest, real human lives, bristling with human faults, marred with human mistakes, scarred and seamed and rifted with human troubles, and crowned with the compassion that only perfection can send upon imperfection. Comes, with happy memories of the past, and quiet confidence for the future. Comes, with the changing scenes of day and night; with winter’s storm and summer’s calm; comes, with the sunny peace and the backward dreams of age; comes, until one day, the eye of the relentless old reaper rests upon old Tom, standing right in the swarth, amid the golden corn. The sweep of the noiseless scythe that never turns its edge, Time passes on, old Tom steps out of young Tom’s way, and the cycle of a life is complete.

GETTING READY FOR THE TRAIN.

When they reached the depot, Mr. Man and his wife gazed in unspeakable disappointment at the receding train, which was just pulling away from the bridge switch at the rate of a thousand miles a minute. Their first impulse was to run after it; but as the train was out of sight, and whistling for Sagetown before they could act upon the impulse, they remained in the carriage and disconsolately turned the horses’ heads homeward.

“It all comes of having to wait for a woman to get ready,” Mr. Man broke the silence with, very grimly.

“I was ready before you were,” replied his wife.

“Great heavens!” cried Mr. Man, in irrepressible impatience, jerking the horses’ jaws out of place, “just listen to that! And I sat out in the buggy ten minutes, yelling at you to come along, until the whole neighborhood heard me!”

“Yes,” acquiesced Mrs. Man, with the provoking placidity which no one can assume but a woman, “and every time I started down stairs you sent me back for something you had forgotten.”

Mr. Man groaned. “This is too much to bear,” he said, “when everybody knows that if I was going to Europe, I would just rush into the house, put on a clean shirt, grab up my gripsack, and fly; while you would want at least six months for preliminary preparations, and then dawdle around the whole day of starting until every train had left town.”

Well, the upshot of the matter was, that the Mans put off their visit to Peoria until the next week, and it was agreed that each one should get ready and go down to the train and go, and the one who failed to get ready should be left. The day of the match came around in due time. The train was to go at 10:30, and Mr. Man, after attending to his business, went home at 9:45.

“Now then,” he shouted, “only three-quarters of an hour to train time. Fly around; a fair field and no favors, you know.”

And away they flew. Mr. Man bulged into this room and rushed through that one, and dived into one closet after another with inconceivable rapidity, chuckling under his breath all the time, to think how cheap Mrs. Man would feel when he started off alone. He stopped on his way up stairs to pull off his heavy boots, to save time. For the same reason he pulled off his coat as he ran through the dining-room, and hung it on the corner of the silver closet. Then he jerked off his vest as he rushed through the hall, and tossed it on a hook in the hat-rack, and by the time he reached his own room he was ready to plunge into his clean clothes. He pulled out a bureau drawer and began to paw at the things, like a Scotch terrier after a rat.

“Eleanor!” he shrieked, “where are my shirts?”

“In your bureau drawer,” quietly replied Mrs. Man, who was standing placidly before a glass, calmly and deliberately coaxing a refractory crimp into place.

“Well, by thunder, they ain’t!” shouted Mr. Man, a little annoyed. “I’ve emptied every last thing out of the drawer, and there isn’t a thing in it that I ever saw before.”

Mrs. Man stepped back a few paces, held her head on one side, and after satisfying herself that the crimp would do, and would stay where she had put it, replied:

“These things scattered around on the floor are all mine. Probably you haven’t been looking in your own drawer.”

“I don’t see,” testily observed Mr. Man, “why you couldn’t have put my things out for me, when you had nothing else to do all morning.”

“Because,” said Mrs. Man, settling herself into an additional article of raiment with awful deliberation, “nobody put mine out for me. ‘A fair field and no favors,’ my dear.”

Mr. Man plunged into his shirt like a bull at a red flag.

“Foul!” he shouted, in malicious triumph. “No button on the neck!”

“Because,” said Mrs. Man, sweetly, after a deliberate stare at the fidgeting, impatient man, during which she buttoned her dress and put eleven pins where they would do the most good, “because you have got the shirt on wrong side out.”

When Mr. Man slid out of that shirt, he began to sweat. He dropped the shirt three times before he got it on, and while it was over his head he heard the clock strike ten. When his head came through he saw Mrs. Man coaxing the ends and bows of her necktie.

“Where’s my shirt studs?” he cried.

Mrs. Man went out into another room and presently came back with gloves and hat, and saw Mr. Man emptying all the boxes he could find in and about the bureau. Then she said:

“In the shirt you just took off.”

Mrs. Man put on her gloves while Mr. Man hunted up and down the room for his cuff buttons.

“Eleanor,” he snarled, at last, “I believe you must know where those buttons are.”

“I haven’t seen them,” said the lady, settling her hat, “didn’t you lay them down on the window sill in the sitting-room last night?”

Mr. Man remembered, and he went down stairs on the run. He stepped on one of his boots, and was immediately landed in the hall at the foot of the stairs with neatness and dispatch, attended in the transmission with more bumps than he could count with a Webb’s adder, and landing with a bang like the Hellgate explosion.

“Are you nearly ready, Algernon?” asked the wife of his family, sweetly, leaning over the balusters.

The unhappy man groaned. “Can’t you throw me down that other boot?” he asked.

Mrs. Man pityingly kicked it down to him.

“My valise?” he inquired, as he tugged away at the boot.

“Up in your dressing-room,” she answered.

“Packed?”

“I do not know; unless you packed it yourself, probably not,” she replied, with her hand on the door knob; “I had barely time to pack my own.”

She was passing out of the gate, when the door opened, and he shouted:

“Where in the name of goodness did you put my vest? It has all my money in it!”

“You threw it on the hat-rack,” she called back, “good-bye, dear.”

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

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

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

“You threw it on the silver closet.”

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

DRIVING THE COW.

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

VOICES OF THE NIGHT.

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

“Ka-lum, ka-lum, ka-lum!”

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

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

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

“Klank, klank, klank!”

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

THE DEMAND FOR LIGHT LABOR.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

MASTER BILDERBACK RETURNS TO SCHOOL.

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

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

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

ODE TO AUTUMN.

AFTER TENNYSON.

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

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

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

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

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

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

THE SORROWS OF THE POOR.

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

“Oh, shoot the hat!”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

MR. GEROLMAN LOSES HIS DOG.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Can’t you find him?”

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

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

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

“Were you wanting me?”

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

“Who hit him? Which way did he go?”

A RAINY DAY IDYL.

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

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

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

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

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

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

SINGULAR TRANSFORMATION.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

SUBURBAN SOLITUDE.

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

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

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

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

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

“Sook-kee! sook-kee! sook-kee!”

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

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

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

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

A BURLINGTON ADDER.

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

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

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

“Multiply 5 by 13, add 19, subtract 39, divide by 2, add 7, multiply by 9, add 15, divide by 7, add 8, multiply by 3, less 13, add 9, multiply by 7, divide by 9, add 13, divide by 11--how many?”

“Ninety-six!” fairly yelled the delighted boy, clapping his hands with merriment at the amazement which crowned the countenances of his interviewers, and the Inspectors turned to the paper man and said, “Take him, Mr. _Hawkeye_.”

Then we did our best to throw the boy. As fast as we could speak, and without punctuation, we rattled off this:

“Add 24 to 171⁄2 multiply by 91⁄2 divide by 1⁄2 add 33 per cent. multiply by 16 extract square root add 9 divide by 3⁄5 of 7⁄8 add 119 divide by 771⁄2 times 443⁄4 square the quotient and multiply by 172⁄3 add 77 and divide by 33 how ma----”

But before we could say the last syllable the boy fairly screamed,

“1277⁄8! Ask me a hard one!”

We had seen enough, and with feelings amounting almost to awe we left this wonderful boy. We talked about his marvelous powers all the way down. Finally it happened to occur to one of the Inspectors to ask the other Inspector,

“Did you follow my example through to notice whether the boy answered it correctly?”

The tone of amazement gradually passed away from the Inspector’s face, as he faintly gasped,

“N-n-no, not exactly, did you?”

Then the first Inspector ceased to look mystified and began to look very much like Mr. Skinner did when he got the Nebraska fruit, and they both turned to the gentleman who represented the literary department of the expedition and said lugubriously,

“Did you?”

But he only said:

“The Burlington and Northwestern narrow-gauge railroad will be owned, not by eastern capitalists, but by the people through whose country it passes.”

MISAPPLIED SCIENCE.

It was only a few years ago the New York _Journal of Information_ published the statement that a man in New Hampshire, who had been unable to speak for five years, went to sleep, one night, with a quid of tobacco in his mouth, and awoke the next morning with his voice perfectly strong and smooth and steady. Old Mr. Jarvis, who lives out on Vine Street, is sorely afflicted with an impediment in his speech, and often says he would give a hundred dollars if he could only “t-t-t-t-taw-taw-talk f-f-f-f-fast enough t-t-to t-t-tell a gug-gug-gug-grocer what he w-w-wants bub-bub-bub-before he gug-gug-gets it measured out.” He takes the _Journal_, and had taken it for twenty-three years, and he firmly believed every thing he ever read in it; Sylvanus Cobb’s stories, Mr. Parton’s Lives of Eminent Americans, the answers to correspondents--Mr. Jarvis had taken them all in and believed every word. He thought that probably this quid-of-tobacco treatment might help his voice a little, and he resolved to give it a good trial any how. The first trouble was that he didn’t chew, and Mrs. Jarvis would never allow a bit of tobacco about the house. But he begged a big “chaw” of navy, and when he went to bed he tucked it snugly away in his cheek, and prepared to sleep in hope. He had his misgivings, and they grew in number and strength as the quid began to assert itself, and be sociable, and assimilate itself with its surroundings. Mrs. Jarvis asked him if he fastened the front gate.

“Um,” said Mr. Jarvis, meaning that he had.

“And are you sure you locked the front door?” queried his restless spouse.

“Um,” replied Mr. Jarvis, meaning that he had not, for he was by this time in no condition to open his mouth.

“Hey?” she replied.

“Um,” persisted Mr. Jarvis.

“What?” she demanded.

“Um-m-m!” protested Mr. Jarvis.

“Well,” said she, “you can’t make me believe you are that near asleep this soon.”

“Um-m-m!” said Mr. Jarvis; meaning that he would get up and bounce her out of that front door if she didn’t hold her clack.

Presently she sat up in bed. Sniff, sniff! “John Jarvis,” she exclaimed, “if I don’t smell tobacco in this house, I’m a sinful woman. Don’t you smell it?”

“’M,” replied Mr. Jarvis; which by interpretation is, that he didn’t smell any thing and was going to sleep.

“It’s in this very room,” she persisted, excitedly.

“Um,” said Mr. Jarvis, meaning that she must be crazy.

“It’s under the bed!” she screamed. “There’s a burglar under the bed! Oh, help! fire! police! John Jarvis!!!” And she smote Mr. Jarvis a furious pelt in the stomach to waken him up.

It was a terrific thump, and its first effect was to knock all the atmosphere out of Mr. Jarvis’s lungs so far that he could only recover his breath by a violent gasp, which first carried the quid of tobacco and all the nicotine preparation that it had been steadily distilling down his throat, and was immediately succeeded by a tremendous cough, as he struggled to rise up in bed, which shot the quid squarely into the eye of the shrieking Mrs. Jarvis.

“Murder! murder!” she screamed, “I’m stabbed! I’m stabbed!”

And John Jarvis choked and coughed and spit and coughed and choked and clutched Mrs. Jarvis by the throat and tried to choke off her noise, but he grew so “ill” that he couldn’t hold his grip, and Mrs. Jarvis, the moment her throat was released from his trembling pressure, rose from the half-strangled gurgles to the sublimity of double-edged screams, and made Rome howl with melody. And the neighbors broke into the house and found a bedroom that looked and smelled like a jury-room or a street car, with the sickest man they ever saw lying with his head over the side of the bed, groaning at the rate of a mile a minute, and the worst frightened woman since the flood sitting up beside him, screaming faster than he groaned, while one of her eyes was plastered up with a black quid of tobacco. And that is the way Mr. Jarvis came to stop his _Journal_. He denounces it as the most infamous, mendacious, pestilent sheet that ever disgraced American journalism.

WIDE AWAKE.

One day Mr. Bellamy, of Pond Street, read in a religious paper the following paragraph:

Many very good people are annoyed by sleepiness in church. The following remedy is recommended: Lift the foot seven inches from the floor, and hold it in suspense without support for the limb, and repeat the remedy if the attack returns.

Now, Mr. Bellamy is a very good man, and he is subject to that very annoyance, which in his case amounts to a positive affliction. So he cut that paragraph out, in accordance with the appended instruction, and pasted it in his hat, and was rejoiced in his inmost soul to think that he had found a relief from his annoyance. He hoped that Deacon Ashbury, who had frowned at him so often and so dreadfully for nodding, hadn’t seen the paragraph, for the deacon sometimes slept under the preached word, and Mr. Bellamy wanted to get even with him. And Mr. Driscoll, who used to sit in the choir, and cover his own sleepiness and divert attention from his own heavy eyes by laughing in a most irreverent and indecorous manner at Mr. Bellamy’s sleepy visage and struggling eyes and head--how the good man did want to get it on Driscoll. So he chuckled and hugged his treasure, so to speak, in his mind. He was so confident that he had found the panacea for his trouble that he went to the minister and told him what a burden his drowsiness had been to him, but that he had made up his mind now to shake it off, and to continue to keep it off, and he was certain that he had sufficient strength of mind and force of will to overcome the habit. And the minister was so pleased, and commended Mr. Bellamy so warmly, and said so earnestly that he wished he had one hundred such men in his congregation, that Mr. Bellamy was so elated and happy and confident that he could hardly wait for Sunday to come to try his new method of averting drowsiness.

Sunday came, however, and soon enough too, for it was Saturday afternoon plumb, chick, chock full of men with bills, over-due notes, trifling accounts, little balances, pay-roll, rent, narrow-gauge subscription, political assessments and one little thing and another, almost before Mr. Bellamy knew it, although it hadn’t been there half an hour before he had some suspicion of it, and was soon very confident of it. Sunday morning found the good man in his accustomed place, devout and drowsy as ever. The church was very comfortably filled with an attentive congregation, and Mr. Bellamy was soon cornered up in one end of the pew, and the strange young lady who sat next him was attended by a very small white dog, that looked like a roll of cotton batting with red eyes and a black nose. The opening exercises passed off without incident, but the minister hadn’t got to secondly when Mr. Bellamy suddenly roused himself with a start from a doze into which he was dropping. His heart fairly stood still as he thought how nearly he had forgotten his recipe. He feared to attract any attention to himself lest his precious method should be discovered, and slowly lifted his left foot from the foot stool and held it about seven inches in the air. As he raised his foot the strange young lady shrunk away from him in evident alarm. This annoyed Mr. Bellamy and disconcerted him so that he was on the point of lowering his foot and whispering an explanation when the dog, which had been quietly sleeping by the footstool opened its eyes, and seeing the uplifted foot slowly descending in its direction, hastily scrambled to its feet and backed away, barking and yelping terrifically. The young lady, now thoroughly alarmed, jerked her feet from off the footstool, which immediately flew up under the weight of Mr. Bellamy’s other foot, and the dog, excited by this additional catastrophe, fairly barked itself into convulsions. Deacon Ashbury, awakened by the racket, came tiptoeing and frowning down the aisle, bending his shaggy brows upon Mr. Bellamy, who actually believed that if he got much hotter he would break out in flames, that not even the beaded perspiration that was standing out on his scarlet face, could extinguish. The young lady rose to leave the pew, Mr. Bellamy rose to explain, and as he did so, she was quite convinced of what she had before been suspicious, that he was crazy. She backed out of the pew and sought Deacon Ashbury’s protection. Mr. Bellamy attempted to whisper an explanation to the deacon, but that austere official motioned him back into his seat, and as the minister paused until the interruption should cease, said in a severe undertone that was heard all over the church.

“You’ve been dreaming again, Brother Bellamy.”

Mr. Bellamy sank into his seat, quite covered with confusion as with a couple of garments and a bed quilt, and his distress was greatly aggravated when he looked up into the choir and saw Driscoll, convulsed with merriment, stuffing his handkerchief into his mouth, and shaking with suppressed laughter.

After service Mr. Bellamy, who was, all through the service, the center of attraction for the entire congregation, waited for his pastor, and made one more effort to explain his unfortunate escapade. But the minister, whose sermon had been quite spoiled by the affair, waved him to silence and said, quite coldly:

“Never mind, Brother Bellamy; don’t apologize; you meant very well, I dare say, but if you make so much disturbance when you are awake, I believe I would prefer to have you sleep quietly through every sermon I preach.”

Mr. Bellamy has since stopped his church paper, and transferred his subscription to the _Hawkeye_, saying that if he could just find the wretch who set stumbling blocks and snares in the columns of the religious press for the feet of weak believers, he could die happy.

THE ARTLESS PRATTLE OF CHILDHOOD.

We always did pity a man who does not love children. There is something morally wrong with such a man. If his tenderest sympathies are not awakened by their innocent prattle, if his heart does not echo their merry laughter, if his whole nature does not reach out in ardent longings after their pure thoughts and unselfish impulses, he is a sour, crusty, crabbed old stick, and the world full of children has no use for him. In every age and clime, the best and noblest men loved children. Even wicked men have a tender spot left in their hardened hearts for little children. The great men of the earth love them. Dogs love them. Kamehamekemokimodahroah, the King of the Cannibal islands, loves them. Rare, and no gravy. Ah yes, we all love children.

And what a pleasure it is to talk with them. Who can chatter with a bright-eyed, rosy-cheeked, quick-witted little darling, anywhere from three to five years, and not appreciate the pride which swells a mother’s breast, when she sees her little ones admired. Ah, yes, to be sure.

One day, ah can we ever cease to remember that dreamy, idle, Summer afternoon--a lady friend who was down in the city on a shopping excursion, came into the sanctum with her little son, a dear little tid-toddler of five bright Summers, and begged us to amuse him while she pursued the duties which called her down town. Such a bright boy; so delightful it was to talk to him. We can never forget the blissful half hour we spent booking that prodigy up in his centennial history.

“Now listen, Clary,” we said--his name is Clarence Fitzherbert Alencon de Marchemont Caruthers--“and learn about George Washington.”

“Who’s he?” inquired Clarence, etc.

“Listen,” we said, “he was the father of his country.”

“Whose country?”

“Ours; yours and mine; the confederated union of the American people, cemented with the life blood of the men of ’76, poured out upon the altars of our country as the dearest libation to liberty that her votaries can offer.”

“Who did?” asked Clarence.

There is a peculiar tact in talking to children that very few people possess. Now most people would have grown impatient and lost their temper when little Clarence asked so many irrelevant questions, but we did not. We knew that, however careless he might appear at first, we could soon interest him in the story and he would be all eyes and ears. So we smiled sweetly,--that same sweet smile which you may have noticed on our photographs, just the faintest ripple of a smile breaking across the face like a ray of sunlight, and checked by lines of tender sadness, just before the two ends of it pass each other at the back of the neck.

And so, smiling, we went on,

“Well, one day George’s father----”

“George who?” asked Clarence.

“George Washington. He was a little boy then, just like you. One day his father----”

“Whose father?” demanded Clarence, with an encouraging expression of interest.

“George Washington’s, this great man we were telling you of. One day George Washington’s father gave him a little hatchet for a----”

“Gave who a little hatchet?” the dear child interrupted with a gleam of bewitching intelligence. Most men would have betrayed signs of impatience, but we didn’t. We know how to talk to children. So we went on:

“George Washington. His----”

“Who give him the little hatchet?”

“His father. And his father----”

“Whose father?”

“George Washington’s.”

“Oh!”

“Yes, George Washington. And his father told him----”

“Told who?”

“Told George.”

“Oh, yes, George.”

And we went on, just as patient and as pleasant as you could imagine. We took up the story right where the boy interrupted, for we could see that he was just crazy to hear the end of it. We said:

“And he told him that----”

“Who told him what?” Clarence broke in.

“Why, George’s father told George.”

“What did he tell him?”

“Why, that’s just what I am going to tell you. He told him----”

“Who told him?”

“George’s father. He----”

“What for?”

“Why, so he wouldn’t do what he told him not to do. He told him----”

“George told him?” queried Clarence.

“No, his father told George----”

“Oh!”

“Yes; told him that he must be careful with the hatchet----”

“Who must be careful?”

“George must.”

“Oh!”

“Yes; must be careful with the hatchet----”

“What hatchet?”

“Why, George’s.”

“Oh!”

“Yes; with the hatchet, and not cut himself with it, or drop it in the cistern, or leave it out in the grass all night. So George went round cutting every thing he could reach with his hatchet. And at last he came to a splendid apple tree, his father’s favorite, and cut it down, and----”

“Who cut it down?”

“George did.”

“Oh!”

“----but his father came home and saw it the first thing, and----”

“Saw the hatchet?”

“No; saw the apple tree. And he said, ‘Who has cut down my favorite apple tree?’”

“What apple tree?”

“George’s father’s. And everybody said they didn’t know any thing about it, and----”

“Any thing about what?”

“The apple tree.”

“Oh!”

“----and George came up and heard them talking about it----”

“Heard who talking about it?”

“Heard his father and the men.”

“What was they talking about?”

“About this apple tree.”

“What apple tree?”

“The favorite apple tree that George cut down.”

“George who?”

“George Washington.”

“Oh!”

“So George came up and heard them talking about it, and he----”

“What did he cut it down for?”

“Just to try his little hatchet.”

“Whose little hatchet?”

“Why, his own, the one his father gave him.”

“Gave who?”

“Why, George Washington.”

“Who gave it to him?”

“His father did.”

“Oh!”

“So George came up and he said, ‘Father, I can not tell a lie, I----’”

“Who couldn’t tell a lie?”

“Why, George Washington. He said, ‘Father, I can not tell a lie. It was----’”

“His father couldn’t?”

“Why no, George couldn’t.”

“Oh, George? oh, yes.”

“----It was I cut down your apple tree; I did----”

“His father did?”

“No, no; it was George said this.”

“Said he cut his father?”

“No, no, no; said he cut down his apple tree.”

“George’s apple tree?”

“No, no; his father’s.”

“Oh!”

“He said----”

“His father said?”

“No, no, no; George said, ‘Father, I can not tell a lie. I did it with my little hatchet.’ And his father said, ‘Noble boy, I would rather lose a thousand trees than have you tell a lie.’”

“George did?”

“No, his father said that.”

“Said he’d rather have a thousand apple trees?”

“No, no, no; said he’d rather lose a thousand apple trees than----”

“Said he’d rather George would?”

“No, said he’d rather he would than have him lie.”

“Oh! George would rather have his father lie?”

We are patient, and we love children, but if Mrs. Caruthers, of Arch Street, hadn’t come and got her prodigy at that critical juncture, we don’t believe all Burlington could have pulled us out of that snarl. And as Clarence Fitzherbert Alencon de Marchemont Caruthers pattered down the stairs, we heard him telling his ma about a boy who had a father named George, and he told him to cut down an apple tree, and he said he’d rather tell a thousand lies than cut down one apple tree.

SPRING DAYS IN BURLINGTON.

Down where the wake-robin springs from its slumbers, Opening its cardinal eye to the sun; Come the dull echoes of far away thunders Heavy and fast as the shots of a gun. Up on the hill where the wild flowers nestle, Like new fallen stars on the green mossy strand; There come the dead notes of the house-cleaning pestle-- The sound of the carpet is heard in the land.

Up! for the song birds their matins are singing; Up, for the morning is tinting the skies; Up, for the good wife the clothes-prop is bringing Out to the line where the hall carpet flies. Up, and away! for the carpet is dusty! Fly, for the house-cleaning days have begun! Run! for the womanly temper is crusty; Up and be doing, lest ye be undone!

Late, late; too late. Just one moment of snoring. He wakes to the sound of the tumult below. O’er the beating of carpets he hears a voice roaring, “Breakfast was over three hours ago!” See, he is plunged in the front of the battle; Where dust is the thickest they tell him to stand; Where suds, mops and scrub-brushes spatter and rattle, And the sound of the carpet is heard in the land.

LIFE IN THE “HAWKEYE” SANCTUM.

The _Hawkeye_ has just got into its new editorial rooms, and it is proud to say it has the finest, most comfortable, complete, and convenient editorial rooms in America. They are finished off with a little invention which will be of untold value to the profession of journalism when it is generally adopted; and we know that it will rapidly come into universal use as soon as its merits are understood and appreciated. We believe it is fully equal, in all that the term implies, to the famous Bogardess Kicker, less liable to get out of order, and less easily detected by casual visitors. It is known as “Middlerib’s Automatic Welcome.” The sanctum is on the same floor as the news-room, being separated from it by a partition, in which is cut a large window, easily opened by an automatic arrangement. The editor’s table is placed in front of that window, and near the head of the stairs; and on the side of the table next the window, directly opposite the editor, the visitor’s chair is placed. It has an inviting look about it, and its entire appearance is guileless and commonplace. But the strip of floor on which that chair rests is a deception and a fraud. It is an endless chain, like the floor of a horse-power, and is operated at will by the editor, who has merely to touch a spring in the floor to set it in motion. Its operation can best be understood by personal inspection.

One morning, soon after the “Middlerib Welcome” had been placed in position, Mr. Bostwick came in with a funny story to tell. He naturally flopped down into the chair that had the strongest appearance of belonging to some one else, and began in his usual happy vein: “I’ve got the richest thing--oh! ah, ha, ha!--the best thing--oh, by George! I can’t--oh, ha, ha, ha! Oh! it’s too _good_! Oh, by George, the richest thing! Oh! it’s _too_ loud! You must never tell where you got--oh, by George, I can’t do it! It’s _too_ good! You know--oh, ha, ha, ha, oh, he, he, he! You know the--oh, by George, I ca--” Here the editor touched the spring, a nail-grab under the bottom of the chair reached swiftly up and caught Mr. Bostwick by the cushion of his pants, the window flew up, and the noiseless belt of floor gliding on its course bore the astonished Mr. Bostwick through the window out into the news-room, half-way down to the cases, where he was received with great applause by the delighted compositors. The window had slammed down as soon as he passed through; and when the editorial foot was withdrawn from the spring and the chair stopped and the nail-grab assumed its accustomed place, young Mr. Bostwick found himself so kind of out of the sanctum, like it might be, that he went slowly and dejectedly down the stairs, as it were, while amazement sat upon his brow, like.

The next casual visitor was Mr. J. Alexis Flaxeter, the critic. He had a copy of the _Hawkeye_ in his hand, with all the typographical errors marked in red ink, and his face was so wreathed in smiles that it was impossible to tell where his mouth ended and his eyes began. He took the vacant chair, and spread the paper out before him, covering up the editorial manuscript. “My keen vision and delicate sense of accuracy,” he said, “are the greatest crosses of my life. Things that you never see are mountains in my sight. Now here, you see, is a----” The spring clicked softly, like an echo to the impatient movement of the editor’s foot, the nail-grab took hold like a bulldog helping a Burlington troubadour over the garden fence, the chair shot back through the window like a meteor, and the window came down with a slam that sounded like a wooden giant getting off the shortest bit of profanity known to man; and all was silent again. Mr. Flaxeter sat very close to the frosted window, staring blankly at the clouded glass, seeing nothing that could offer any explanation of what he would have firmly believed was a land slide, had he not heard the editor, safe in his guarded den, softly whistling, “We shall meet but we shall miss him.”

Then there was a brief interval of quiet in the sanctum, and a rustling of raiment was heard on the stairs. A lovely woman entered, and stood unawed in the editorial presence. The E. P., on its part, was rather nervous and uncomfortable. The lovely woman seated herself in the fatal chair. She slapped her little gripsack on the table, and opened her little subscription book. She said: “I am soliciting cash contributions--strictly, exclusively, and peremptorily cash contributions--to pay off the church debt, and buy an organ for the Mission Church of the Forlorn Strangers, and I expect----.” There are times when occasion demands great effort. The editor bowed his head, and, after one brief spasm of remorse, felt for the secret spring. The window went up like a charm; the reckless nail-grab hung back for a second, as if held by a feeling of innate delicacy, and then it shut its eyes and smothered its pity, and reached up and took a death-like hold on a roll of able and influential newspapers and a network of string and tape, and the cavalcade backed out into the news-room with colors flying. The chair stopped just before the familiar spirit who was washing the forms; and, as the lovely woman gazed at the inky face, she shrieked: “Merciful heavens, where, where am I?” and was borne down the gloomy stairway unconscious; while the printers whose cases were nearest the wicked window heard the editor singing, as it might be to himself, “Dearest sister, thou hast left us.”

An hour of serenity and tranquillity in the editorial room was broken by a brisk, business-like step on the stairs; the door flew open with a bang that shot the key half-way across the room, and a sociable-looking, familiar kind of a stranger jammed into the chair, slapped his hat over the ink-stand, pushed a pile of proof, twenty pages of copy, a box of pens, the paste-cup, and a pair of scissors off the table to make room for the old familiar flat sample case, and said, in one brief breath: “I am agent for Gamberton’s Popular Centennial World’s History and American Citizens’ Treasure Book of Valuable Information sold only by subscription and issued in thirty parts each number embellished with one handsome steel-plate engraving and numerous beautifully executed wood-cuts no similar work has ever been published in this country and at the exceedingly low price at which it is offered $2 per vol----.”

The spring clicked like a pistol-shot, the window went up half-way through the ceiling, the nail-grab took hold like a three-barreled harpoon, and the column moved on its backward way through the window, down through the news-room past the foreman, standing grim and silent, by the imposing stone, past the cases, vocal with the applause and encouraging and consolatory remarks of the compositors, on to the alley windows, over the sills--howling, yelling, shrieking, praying, the unhappy agent was hurled to the cruel pavement, three stories below, where he lit on his head and plunged through into a cellar, where he tried to get a subscription out of a man who was shoveling coal.

THE LANGUAGE OF FLOWERS.

It was a Mt. Pleasant girl. No other human divinity could play such a heartless trick on an admiring, nay, an adoring and adorable, young man. He always praised the flowers she wore, and talked so learnedly about flowers in general, that this incredulous young angel “put up a job” on him--if one may be so sacrilegious as to write slang in connection with so much beauty and grace. She filled the bay window with freshly potted weeds which she had laboriously gathered from the sidewalk and in the hollow under the bridge, and when he came round that evening she led the conversation to flowers, and her admirer to the bay window. “Such lovely plants she had,” she told him, and he just clasped his hands and looked around him in silly ecstasy, trying to think of their names.

“That is _Patagonia influenses_, Mr. Bogundus,” she said, pointing to the miserable cheat of a young rag-weed; “did you ever see any thing so delicate?”

“Oh!” he ejaculated, regarding it reverentially; “beautiful, beautiful; what delicately serrated leaves!”

“And,” she went on, with a face as angelic as though she was only saying “Now I lay me down to sleep,” “it breaks out in the Summer in such curious green blossoms, clinging to long, slender stems. Only think of that--green blossoms.” And she gazed pensively on the young man as though she saw something green that probably never would blossom.

“Wonderful, wonderful indeed,” he said, “one can never tire of botany. It continually opens to us new worlds of wonders with every awakening flower and unfolded leaf.”

“And here,” she said, indicating with her snowy finger a villainous sprout of that little bur the boys call “beggar’s lice,” “this _Mendicantis parasitatis_, what----”

“Oh!” he exclaimed, rapturously, “where did you get it? Why, do you know how rare it is? I have not seen one in Burlington since Mrs. O’Gheminie went to Chicago. She had such beautiful species of them; such a charming variety. She used to wear them in her hair so often.”

“No doubt,” the angel said dryly; and the young man feared he had done wrong in praising Mrs. O’Gheminie’s plants so highly. But the dear one went on, and pointing to a young jimson weed, said:

“This is my pet, this _Jimsonata filiofensis_.”

The young man gasped with the pleasure of a true lover of flowers, as he bent over it in admiration and inhaled its nauseous odor. Then he rose up and said:

“This plant has some medicinal properties.”

“Ah!” she said.

“Yes,” he replied, stiffly, “it has. I have smelt that plant in my boyhood days. Wilted on the kitchen stove, then bruised and applied to the eruption, the leaves are excellent remedial agents for the poison of the ivy.” He strode past the smiling company that gathered in the parlor, and said sternly, “We meet no more!” and, seizing her father’s best hat from the rack, he extinguished himself in it, and went banging along the line of tree-boxes which lined his darkened way.

SPRING TIME IN AMERICA.

Dear, faded, flowers, they bloom again, Like echoes of the spring time gone; And mossy hillside, shadowy glen, Break out in beauty like the dawn. In regal beauty, leaf and bud Bend ’neath the kisses of the breeze, And “Spanish Mixture for the Blood” Smiles from the fences, rocks and trees.

Dear, smiling Spring, what tender hope Breathes from the life-awakening soil; How “Bolus’ Anti-bilious Dope,” And “Dr. Gastric’s Castor Oil” Bid frightened nature wake and smile; For spring time’s blossoms fill us less With thoughts of pansies than with vile “Panaceas” for “Biliousness.”

If to the wooded nook we stray, Where every swelling germ is huge With life; each gray-browed rock will say, “Use Philogaster’s Vermifuge.” If from these sylvan bowers we fly, We fly, alas, to other ills; And farm-yard gates and barn-doors cry, “Take Ginsengrooter’s Liver Pills.”

Each blue-eyed violet hides a “Pill,” There’s scent of “Rhubarb” in the air; “Rheumatic Plasters” line each hill, And “Bitters” blossom everywhere. With “Ague Cures” the eyes are seared; The air is thick, or thin, I meant, For Nature’s face and clothes are smeared With “Universal Liniment.”

WOODLAND MUSIC AND POETRY.

But Mr. Middlerib’s greatest delight, escaping from his daily wrangle with phlegmatic Peorians, was to seek some cool, sequestered spot, where the air was vocal with the song of birds, there to read, and ponder, and doze, and blend with the melody of the woodland warblers wrathful objurgations of the gnats, and flies, and mosquitoes, and hard-backed bugs that nobody knew the names of. But his poetical nature rose above all these minor distractions, and he enjoyed his seclusion and its sylvan delights. One lovely morning he sat in a vine-embowered porch, with four cages of canaries hanging above his head, and the trees around fairly alive with the wild birds, and as he listened to the varied, melodious passages of the wild-wood orchestra, he grew enraptured, and in a moment of enthusiasm gave himself up to poetry for Mrs. M.’s benefit. He opened the book in his hand, and in a lull of the music he began:

“A cloud lay cradled near the set----”

“Tweetle, tweetle, twee twee tweedle dee tweet tweet!” broke in ear-piercing chorus from the four cages, “twee, twee, tweedle de deedle, twee twee!”

“What a delightful interruption,” said Mr. Middlerib, sweetly; and, with a tender smile wrinkling his placid face, like the upper crust of a green apple pie, he waited for the music to cease, and resumed:

“A cloud lay cra----”

“Twee, twee, twee-ee-ee, tweedle, tweedle, tweedle! Tweet-te-deet-deet, tweet tweet! Tweedle-de-deedle, tweetle, tweetle tweet tweet!”

“A poem without words,” said Mr. Middlerib, softly, glancing from his book toward the cages wherein eight yellow throats were manufacturing music of the shrillest key that ever developed an ear-ache or woke up a deaf and dumb asylum. Presently he got another chance, and resumed once more:

“A cloud lay cradled near the set----”

“To-whoot! To-whoot! Whootle-te-toot-toot!” came from a bird in the nearest hickory, a solemn-looking bird with a brown back and a voice like a wooden whistle. Mr. Middlerib paused and glanced toward the tree, while the benign smile which made his face look like a damaged photograph of one of the early Christian martyrs, faded away like a summer twilight. He resumed:

“A cloud lay cra----”

“Too-toot too doodle toot-te-doot! Wheetle de deetle, tweet tweet tweetle tweet, twee twee whoot de doot too too, chippity-wippity, cheep-cheep-cheep, whoot, squack squack!” went off the whole chorus, cages and trees, supplemented by a visiting party of cat-birds, all aroused into indignant and jealous protest by the obtrusive solo of the wooden-whistle bird, who appeared to be an object of general dislike. Mr. Middlerib, thinking he would read down opposition, went right on:

“----dled near the setting sun, A gleam of crim----”

“K-r-r-r-r-r-r!”

A woodpecker tapped his merry roundelay on the roof of the porch, and Mrs. Middlerib sprang from her chair with, “Mercy on us! what is that?” Mr. Middlerib made a cutting remark about people who had no appreciation of the beautiful in nature or art, and remarked:

“A gleam of crimson tinged its----”

“Twee-ee, twee, deedle-eedle-odle twiddle twoddle, twoot, too too tweedle oot! Teedle idle eedle odle, twee twee, twee! Pe weet, pe weet! Whootle ootle tootle too, squack squack!”

Mr. Middlerib elevated his voice to about ninety degrees in the shade, and roared:

“----tinged its braided snow, Long had I wat----”

“Caw, caw, caw! Ca-a-a-aw!” came from the pensive crow, startled from its quiet retreat in the old dead cottonwood, and Miss Middlerib giggled. But Mr. M. inflated his lungs and roared on:

“----ched the glory moving on, O’er the still radiance----”

“Tweetle de twootle, caw, caw, tweetle doodle tweet tweet! K-r-r-r-r-r-r, krk, krk! twee deedle eet tweet! teedle idle, whoot, toot, twoot! who! squack, squack, k-r-r-r----”

“Shut up, ye nasty, squawking, yallipin’, howlin’ little beasts! Shoo! Light out o’ this or I’ll stone ye from here to Halifax! Scat with yer noise! Oh!” exclaimed the exasperated worshiper of nature as he hurled his book into the nearest tree and went off the porch to look for some stones, “If there is any thing in this world I hate more than another, it’s a lot of nasty, flittering, fidgety, yowping, howling birds! Ugh!” And he threw his shoulder nearly out of joint, and sprained his arm, in a herculean but futile effort to hit a black bird a mile and a half away, with a rock as big as a straw hat. He has dropped the sulphur baths for the present and taken to arnica.

BUYING A TIN CUP.

The town was dozing in the drowsy sunlight of a dull August afternoon, when a dejected looking man, with the appearance of one who was making desperate efforts to appear unconcerned, stepped into a prominent and fashionable dry goods establishment up on Jefferson Street. Scorning the proffered stool, he braced himself firmly against the counter, and looking the polite and attentive clerk fixedly in the eye, broke the impressive silence by abruptly demanding:

“Gimme tinkup!”

“We do not keep them, sir,” smilingly replied the affable clerk, and the glare of suspicion with which that man regarded him was sufficient to chill the blood of a snake.

“Donkeep tinkups?” he asked, quickly and distrustfully.

“No, sir,” replied the clerk, “we have no tin cups. This is a dry goods store. You will find the tin store farther up the street.”

“Few donkeep notinkups--watchkeep?” demanded the man, imperiously.

“We have grenadines, calicos, bareges, gros grain ribbons, tarletan, velvets, moire antique, empress cloth, pongee and Japanese silks----”

“Shut her off!” ejaculated the man, “Puttit tup! Puttit tup!”

He turned away with a dignified gesture, and walked away with stately, though uncertain strides, and dived into the Plunder store, where he startled the proprietor by the same urgent demand for the “tinkup,” and he was finally piloted into Kaut & Kriechbaum’s, where he bought his “tinkup,” which he fell down on before he got to the Barret House corner, mashing it flat as a pie pan. He was helped into his wagon, and as he drove away the last the citizens saw of him he was holding the flattened tin cup before him, exclaiming ruefully:

“Devlofa--lookin--tinkupthatis!”

ONE OF THE LEGION.

A citizen of South Hill, His visage bathed in tears, His raiment streaked with rust and dust, His mind distraught with fears, Was leaning up by the shattered gate, And his sad eyes gazed around Where reckless ruin here and there With fragments strewed the ground. But a drayman stood beside him To hear what he might say, As he stretched him out his good right arm And waited for his pay.

The weeping mover faltered As he saw the drayman’s hand, And he said, “I haven’t a red, red cent In all of this broad fair land. I haven’t a clothes to my aching back Save only these rags you see; And all the furniture I have left Won’t pay you half your fee. There’s a leg of the table in the street, And the lamp globes strew the stair, And the stovepipe’s flattened out like a lath, And the clock is not nowhere.

“Tell my wife, if you can find her, That when the job was done, The furniture wasn’t half so good As it was when we begun. That the end of the bureau she’s looking for Is down by the alley gate, And the parlor mirror is bent so bad She never can pound it straight. We broke the legs of the kitchen stove, And we smashed the Parian vase, And the dray ran over her rocking chair And ruined its stately grace.

“Tell my sister, her darling new spring hat Was packed in a bag of corn, And I never again can look in her face And meet her glance of scorn. We spilled coal oil on her summer silk, And we tore her cashmere sacque, For her dressing bureau fell off the dray And the horse kicked out its back.

“There’s another, not a sister, In happier days gone by, You’d know her by the savage light That glittered in her eye. Too business-like for foolery, Too sharp for my excuses-- Ah me, I fear adversity Has naught but bitter uses; Tell her, the last time you saw me-- For ere the clock strikes ten, I’ll be at work on the ‘Third Degree,’ The happiest of men; Tell her I said that she could go To the bow-wow wow-wow wows; That I’d stay down town when lodge was out, And sleep at a boarding-house Tell her she needn’t sit up for me, And she needn’t leave no light----” And a voice came out of the hall and said, “You don’t go to no Lodge to-night.”

His voice was gone in a minute, He gasped and tried to speak; He tried to swear, but the drayman says That he couldn’t raise a squeak.

And his mother-in-law rose slowly, And calmly she looked down On the green grass of the littered yard, With household treasures strewn. Yes, calmly on that dreadful scene She gazed, and looked around, And said to the weeping man by the gate, “Pick them things up off the ground.”

A TACITURN WITNESS.

An ordinary case of assault and battery was called in Judge Stutsman’s court, and the prosecuting witness was duly sworn: Phelim O’Shaughnessy, a little, weazen-faced man, with a stubbly beard all over his jaws and a pair of bright eyes flanking the snubbiest of noses.

“Now, then, Mr. O’Shaughnessy,” said the court, “tell what you know about this matter in as few words as you possibly can.”

“Faix, thin, yer anner, an’ I will do that same,” replied the witness, with great volubility. “Av’ there is ony thing I do be despisin’ it’s wan ov thim same whurrimurroo gabblers that niver know when they’re through. When ye git troo pumpin, sez I, lave the handle; that’s me. An’ ye niver see an O’Shaughnessy in the wor-r-ld, yer anner, that wur a cackler. I mind me mither’s own uncle that ever was, Tim the Croaker they used to be callin’ him, though his name was Timothy Mahone O’Dubbleriggle Balbrigganainey, for be the token he niver wur known to say more nor wan wor-rud at a time, yer anner, an’ that wan he said with a grunt. There was wan day, whin he wur gamekeeper fur my lord Donald McAlpin Clanargotty Callum O’Dowd, a Scotch gintleman that owned a bit av a shootin’ box might be, in the north uv----”

“Well, there, there, there,” interrupted the court, “that’s enough about your ancestry; now tell what you know about this case of yours, and stick to the point.”

“The p’int, is it, avick?” replied the witness; “Musha, thin, it wur fwhat I wur comin’ to, jist. It’s what I sez to Mrs. O’Shaughnessy twinty times a day, an’ she’s the wor-r-rst talker between here an’ Dublin bay. ‘Norah,’ sez I; ‘Is it you,’ sez she; ‘Faix thin, an’ who else wud it be?’ sez I; ‘An’ phwat uv it?’ sez she; ‘Div ye mind me, now?’ sez I; ‘Sorra the wan uv me does,’ sez she; ‘Wait thin, till I tell ye,’ sez I; ‘Whisht, thin, go on with yer blarney,’ sez she; ‘Howld yer hush a minit, thin,’ sez I, ‘an’ let’s have a second av quiet;’ ‘What!’ sez she, ‘wid ye in the house?’ ‘Listhen,’ sez I; ‘Whisper, thin,’ sez she; ‘Well, thin,’ sez I, ‘kape to the p’int. Av yez will do nothin’ but talk from the peep o’ mor-r-rn till the lasht wink uv night, kape till the p’int.’ Ah, yer anner, it’s the wan fur talkin’, she is, is Norah. It isn’t an O’Shaughnessy she is, yer anner, her father, rest his sowl, was ould Darby Muldoon, the solid man, an’ he wur sint to Austhralia for twenty-sivin years panal sarvitude fur talkin’ a thraveler to death whin he wur dhrivin’ him from----”

“That will do,” interrupted the court, sternly; “we’ve heard enough of your reminiscences. Now you tell what you know about this case, or I’ll fine you for contempt. You have filed information against Morris McHogadan for assaulting you with a paving hammer, in the back yard of your own premises in Melrose Place, Happy Hollow, and knocking three teeth down your throat, breaking one of your ribs, and chewing your ear off. Now what have you got to say about it?”

“Is it me, avick?”

“Yes, you are the prosecuting witness; that is your own case, and you filed the information on which the warrant was issued.”

“An’ it says that Morris McHogadan bate me?”

“It does, and it is sworn to.”

“Oh, the divil an’ all; who shwore to that?”

“You did.”

“PHWAT?”

“You swore to all that.”

“Oh, tower uv ivory! That Morris McHogadan bate me?”

“Yes.”

“Wid a pavin’ hammer?”

“Yes, so you declared.”

“Oh-h-h, thundher an’ turf! An’ bate me teeth down the troat ov me?”

“So you averred.”

“Oh, the bloody-minded villin; an’ broke me rib?”

“That’s what you said.”

“Oh-h-h, bones of the martyrs; and chawed off the ear o’ me?”

“So you told us.”

“Oh, to the divil wid the informashin that says sich a pack o’ lies. Morris McHogadan bate me? Och, Moses an’ Aarin, its tearin’ ravin’ disthracted mad I am! Why, yer anner, it’s a bloody-minded lie. He can’t fip wan side o’ me; why, the pig-eyed thafe ov the wor-rold, I clawed all the red hair out ov the ugly head of him and trowed him down the bank ov the crick, and welted him like an ould shoe wid a splinther ov timber I grabbed out of the crick. Him bate me? He can’t bate nobody. I didn’t lave a whole bone in his ugly carkiss, an’ av he dares to say I did, yer anner, I’ll ate off his other ear an’ pound the flure wid him. Oh, the divil fly away wid sich infermashin. It’s the beggar’s own lie, an’----”

Here the witness was cut short by the court fining him $10.00 and costs for assault and battery, and Phelim, astonished into a terrific flow of volubility for such a taciturn man, went away with a policeman, arguing that it wasn’t possible that he could be fined when he was the prosecuting witness, and declaring that the case never would have gone against him but for “the bloody-minded infermashin,” which he firmly believed to be the evil work of the designing Morris McHogadan.

THE SEEDSMAN.

How doth the busy nurseryman Improve each shining hour; And peddle cions, sprouts and seeds Of every shrub and flower.

How busily he wags his chin, How neat he spreads his store, And sells us things that never grew And won’t grow any more.

Who showed the little man the way To sell the women seed? Who taught him how to blow and lie And coax and beg and plead?

He taught himself, the nurseryman; And when his day is done, We’ll plant him where the lank rag weeds Will flutter in the sun.

But oh, although we plant him deep Beneath the buttercup, He’s so much like the seed he sells, He never will come up.

CORNERING THE BOYS.

Only a few days before they moved the capital, a worthy lady of Peoria one morning detected her two sons laughing immoderately. Suspecting that she was the cause of their disrespectful mirth, the good woman involuntarily loosened her slipper and called up the young culprits.

“Thomas, what made you laugh?”

“Nobody made me laugh; I laughed on purpose.”

“None of your impudence, sir. John, why were you laughing at the door just now?”

John (eagerly)--“Wasn’t laughing at the door, I was laughing at Tom.”

Tom--“And I was laughing at John.”

The matron assumed a dignified attitude. “Now, my boys, what were you both laughing at?”

Boys (in a triumphant shout)--“We were both laughing at once!”

The good lady summoned all her energies for a final effort, and resolved to corner the boys by a settling question.

“Now, then, I want you to tell me, Tom, what made John laugh and you laugh?”

Tom--“John didn’t laugh a new laugh; it was the same old laugh!”

Neither of the boys got whipped, the slipper slid back to its accustomed place, and to this day nobody knows what those boys laughed at.

SELLING THE HEIRLOOM.

One afternoon, about a week after the big Fourth of July, a hungry-looking man made his appearance down near the post-office corner, carrying in his arms an old-fashioned clock, about four feet high, with some ghastly looking characters scrawled across the dial, like the photograph of a fire-cracker label with the delirium tremens. He set the clock down, and in loud tones called upon the passers-by to pause, as he was about to make a sacrifice that would break the heart of the oldest horologer living. He was going to sell that clock, he said. An old family heirloom, and a genuine curiosity of antiquity, which he would not ordinarily take thousands of dollars for, but which he sold now because he was out of work, penniless; and when his wife and children cried to him for bread, he could not say them nay when he had that in his possession that would, in any intelligent community, bring them food and plenty.

“Gentlemen,” he said, “look at that clock. A relic of antiquity. One of the oldest Chinese clepsydras in the world. Bamboo case and sandal-wood running gear. Not an ounce of metal in its construction. Made in China by the eminent horologer Tchin Pitshoo, as near as can be ascertained, three hundred years after the flood. Worth a thousand dollars if it’s worth a cent; but of course I don’t expect to get half its value in these hard times. The inscription on the face is in the characters of the purest Confucian Chinese, and the interpretation of them is, ‘Time flies and money is twelve per cent.’ Now what are you going to give me for that clock? Who will buy this clock, and present it to the Iowa Historical Society or the Burlington Library? How much? Start her up; send her ahead at something, gentlemen; there’s a woman and five children that haven’t had a bite to eat for two days, and can’t get a crumb till the money for this clock is in my pocket. A marvelous time-piece; never lost----”

A man in brown overalls and a dirty face lounged up to the clock, and after scratching the case with a pin, to assure himself that it was really a genuine Chinese clepsydra, bid ten cents.

“Ten cents!” roared the man, rolling his eyes--“Heaven, hold back your lightnings! Don’t strike him dead just yet! Give him time to repent. Ten cents to buy food for a starving woman and five children. Ten cents for a d----” He choked with emotion, and could not go on for a moment. “Ten cents! Why, that clock only has to be wound once a month, and it records every minute of time; tells just how long it will take you to get to the depot; tells when the train starts, and when the children are late to school. This clock, gentlemen, will tell when the oldest boy has played hookey and gone off fishing; it tells how late the hired girl’s beau stays Sunday night, and it will register the exact minute of our oldest daughter’s arrival and departure at and from the front gate after ten o’clock at night. Why, after you’ve had it six weeks, you’ll not take six hundred dollars for it. It runs fast all day and slow all night, giving a man fourteen hours’ sleep in the Winter and sixteen hours’ sleep in the Summer, without disturbing the accurate average of the day a minute. Ten cents for such a clock as that! Ten cents! Gentlemen, this is robbery; it’s cold-blooded murder. At ten cents; at ten, at ten, atten, atten, attenat-tennit-tennit-tennet-tenatenatenaten a-a-t ten cents only am I offered, twenty do I hear? At ten--”

An old rag-man, after a critical examination of the marvel, bid fifteen cents, and was instantly regarded as a mortal enemy by the first bidder.

“Fifteen cents!” exclaimed the seller. “Gentlemen, knock me down and rob me of my clothes, strip me naked if you will, but don’t plunder a gasping, starving woman and five weak, helpless babes. Don’t rob the dying. Fifteen cents. Why, I’ve suffered more than three hundred dollars’ worth of privation and sorrow and misery, rather than sell this clock at all. Fifteen cents. Why, you set that clock where the sun shines on it, and it will indicate a rain storm three days in advance, and will tell where the lightning is going to strike. Why, you could make millions by buying this clock to bet on. It will tell, just three weeks before election, who is going to beat. It’s a credit to any household, and will run the whole family on tick. Fifteen cents! why, it won’t pay for the shelf you stand it on. Fifteen cents for a clock that used to be owned by an emperor! Fifteen cents. Oh, kill me dead. At fifteen cents, fifteen, fiftn, fiftn, fift, nfift, nfift, nfiftnfiftnfift, ta-a-a-t fifteen cents for a clock that can’t be duplicated this side of the Yang tse Kiang. At fifteen ce--thank you sir, twenty cents I have; twenty cents to feed a starving family of seven souls; twenty cents for a barefooted woman and five ragged children that haven’t tasted food since Monday morning; twenty cents, from a city of thirty thousand inhabitants, for a starving family; there’s Christian philanthropy for you. Twenty cents from the commercial capital of Iowa, for a clock that would be snapped up anywhere else in the world at hundreds, merely for its antiquity; there’s intelligent appreciation of the arts and culture for you. Gentlemen, I can’t stand this much longer; my heart is breaking. Twenty cents, twenty cents, twenty, twent, twen, twen, twentwentwen, and sold--a thousand-dollar clock, starving woman, dying children, heart-broken man, and all to the second-hand-store man for twenty cents.”

He took his money, a ragged shinplaster and two street car nickels, and walked away with a dejected, heart-broken air. He stopped in at a bakery with frosted windows and transient doors, to buy bread for his starving wife and babes, and his voice was husky with emotion as he said to the natty-looking baker, whose diamond pin glittered over the walnut counter,

“Gimme a plain sour.”

THE ROMANCE OF THE CARPET.

Basking in peace, in the warm Spring sun, South Hill smiled upon Burlington.

The breath of May! and the day was fair, And the bright motes danced in the balmy air,

And the sunlight gleamed where the restless breeze Kissed the fragrant blooms on the apple trees.

His beardless cheek with a smile was spanned As he stood with a carriage-whip in his hand.

And he laughed as he doffed his bob-tailed coat, And the echoing folds of the carpet smote.

And she smiled as she leaned on her busy mop, And said she would tell him when to stop.

So he pounded away till the dinner bell Gave him a little breathing spell.

But he sighed when the kitchen clock struck one; And she said the carpet wasn’t done.

But he lovingly put in his biggest licks, And pounded like mad till the clock struck six.

And she said, in a dubious kind of way, That she guessed he could finish it up next day.

Then all that day, and the next day too, The fuzz from the dustless carpet flew.

And she’d give it a look at eventide, And say, “Now beat on the other side.”

And the new days came as the old days went, And the landlord came for his regular rent.

And the neighbors laughed at the tireless boom, And his face was shadowed with clouds of gloom;

Till at last, one cheerless Winter day, He kicked at the carpet and slid away,

Over the fence and down the street, Speeding away with footsteps fleet;

And never again the morning sun Smiled at him beating his carpet drum;

And South Hill often said, with a yawn, “Where has the carpet martyr gone?”

* * * * *

Years twice twenty had come and passed, And the carpet swayed in the autumn blast;

For never yet, since that bright spring time, Had it ever been taken down from the line.

Over the fence a gray-haired man Cautiously clim, clome, clem, clum, clam;

He found him a stick in the old wood-pile, And he gathered it up with a sad, grim smile.

A flush passed over his face forlorn As he gazed at the carpet, tattered and torn;

And he hit it a most resounding thwack, Till the startled air gave its echoes back.

And out of the window a white face leaned, And a palsied hand the sad eyes screened.

She knew his face--she gasped, she sighed: “A little more on the under side.”

Right down on the ground his stick he throwed, And he shivered and muttered, “Well, I am blowed!”

And he turned away, with a heart full sore, And he never was seen, not none no more.

SODDING AS A FINE ART.

One day, early in the Spring, Mr. Blosberg, who lives out on Ninth Street, made up his mind that he would sod his front yard himself, and when he had formed this public-spirited resolution, he proceeded to put it into immediate execution. He cut his sod, in righteous and independent and liberty-loving disregard of the ridiculous city ordinance in relation thereto, from the patches of verdure that the cows had permitted to obtain a temporary growth along the side of the street, and proceeded to beautify his front yard therewith. Just as he had laid the first sod, Mr. Thwackery, his next door neighbor, passed by.

“Good land, Blosberg,” he shouted, “you’ll never be able to make any thing of such a sod as that. Why, its three inches too thick. That sod will cake up and dry like a brick. You want to shave at least two inches and a half off the bottom of it, so the roots of the grass will grow into the ground and unite the sod with the earth. That sod is thick enough for a corner stone.”

So Mr. Blosberg took the spade and shaved the sod down until it was thin and about as pliable as a buckwheat cake, and Mr. Thwackery pronounced it all right and sure to grow, and passed on. Just as Mr. Blosberg got it laid down the second time, old Mr. Templeton, who lived on the next block, came along and leaned on the fence, intently observing the sodder’s movements.

“Well now, Blosberg,” he said at length, “I did think you had better sense than that. Don’t you know a sod will never grow on that hard ground? You must spade it all up first, and break the dirt up fine and soft to the depth of at least four inches, or the grass can never take root in it. Don’t waste your time and sod by putting grass on top of such a baked brick-floor as that.”

And Mr. Blosberg laid aside the sod and took up the spade and labored under Mr. Templeton’s directions until the ground was all properly prepared for the sod, and then Mr. Templeton, telling him that sod couldn’t die on that ground now if he tried to kill it, went his way and Mr. Blosberg picked up that precious sod a third time, and prepared to put it in its place. Before he had fairly poised it over the spot, however, his hands were arrested by a terrific shout, and looking up he saw Major Bladgers shaking his cane at him over the fence.

“Blosberg, you insufferable donkey,” roared the Major, “don’t you know that you’ll lose every blade of grass you can carry if you put your sod on that dry ground? There you’ve gone and cut it so thin that all the roots of the grass are cut and bleeding, and you must soak that ground with water until it is a perfect pulp, so that the roots will sink right into it, and draw nutrition from the moist earth. Wet her down, Blosberg, if you want to see your labor result in any thing.”

So Mr. Blosberg put the sod aside again, and went and pumped water and carried it around in buckets until his back ached like a soft corn, and when he had finally transformed the front yard into a morass, the Major was satisfied, and assuring Mr. Blosberg that his sod would grow beautifully now, even if he laid it on upside down, marched away, and Mr. Blosberg made a fourth effort to put the first sod in its place. He got it down and was going back after another, when old Mrs. Tweedlebug checked him in his wild career.

“Lawk, Mr. Blosberg, ye musn’t go off an’ leave that sod lying that way. You must take the spade and beat it down hard, till it is all flat and level, and close to the ground everywhere. You must pound it hard, or the weeds will all start up under it and crowd out the grass.”

Mr. Blosberg went back, and stooping over the sod hit it a resounding thwack with his spade that shot great gouts and splotches of mud all over the parlor windows and half-way to the top of the house, and some of it came flying into his face and on his clothes, while a miscellaneous shower made it dangerous even for his adviser, who, with a feeble shriek of disapprobation, went hastily away, digging raw mud out of her ears. Mr. Blosberg didn’t know how long to keep on pounding, and he didn’t see Mrs. Tweedlebug go away, so he stood with his spade poised in the air and his eyes shut tight, waiting for instructions. And as he waited he was surprised to hear a new voice accost him. It was the voice of Mr. Thistlepod, the old agriculturist, of whom Mr. Blosberg bought his apples and butter.

“Hello, Mr. Blosberg!” he shouted, in tones which indicated that he either believed Mr. Blosberg to be stone deaf or two thousand miles away.

Mr. Blosberg winked violently to get the soil out of his eyes, and turned in the direction of the noise to say, “Good evening.”

“Soddin’, hey?” asked Mr. Thistlepod.

“Trying to, sir,” replied Mr. Blosberg, rather cautiously.

“’Spect it will grow, hey?”

Mr. Blosberg, having learned by very recent experience how liable his plans were to be overthrown, was still non-committal, and replied that “he hoped so.”

“Wal, if ye hope so, ye mustn’t go to poundin’ yer sod to pieces with that spade. Ye don’t want to ram it down so dad binged tight and hard there can’t no air git at the roots. Ye must shake that sod up a little, so as to loosen it, and then jest press it down with yer foot ontwil it jest teches the ground nicely all round. Sod’s too thin, anyhow.”

So Mr. Blosberg thrust his hands into the nasty mud under his darling, much abused sod, and spread his fingers wide apart to keep it from breaking to pieces as he raised it, and finally got it loosened up and pressed down to Mr. Thistlepod’s satisfaction, who then told him he didn’t believe he could make that sod grow any way, and drove away. Then Mr. Blosberg stepped back to look at that sod, feeling confident that he had got through with it, when young Mr. Simpson came along.

“Hello, Blos, old boy; watchu doin’?”

Mr. Blosberg timorously answered that he was sodding a little. Then Mr. Simpson pressed his lips very tightly together to repress a smile, and let his cheeks swell and bulge out to the size of toy balloons with suppressed merriment, and finally burst into a snort of derisive laughter that made the windows rattle in the houses on the other side of the street, and he went on, leaving Mr. Blosberg somewhat nettled and a little discouraged. He stood, with his fingers spread wide apart, holding his arms out like wings, and wondering whether he had better go get another sod or go wash his hands, when a policeman came by, and paused. “Soddin’?” he asked, sententiously.

“Yes, sir, a little,” replied Mr. Blosberg, respectfully.

“Where’d you get your sod?” inquired the representative of public order.

Mr. Blosberg dolefully indicated the little bare parallelogram in the scanty patch of verdure as his base of supplies.

“You’re the man I’ve been lookin’ for,” replied public order. “You come along with me.”

And Mr. Blosberg went along, and the Police Judge fined him $11.95, and when Mr. Blosberg got home he found that a cow had got into his yard during his absence and stepped on that precious sod five times, and put her foot clear through it every time, so that it looked like a patch of moss rolled up in a wad, more than a sod. And then Mr. Blosberg fell on his knees and raised his hands to heaven, and registered a vow that he would never plant another sod if this whole fertile world turned into a Sahara for want of his aid.

THE AMENITIES OF POLITICS.

“There is one thing,” said Mr. Leatherby, as he was walking down town one drizzling, disagreeable morning during the last presidential campaign, “that disgusts me with politics, and that is, the violent and abusive tone in which our daily papers conduct the discussion of every issue and question which they touch upon.”

“Indeed you may well be disgusted at it,” replied old Mr. Bartholomew, who had just joined him. “It is as much as a man can do to lift a newspaper off his door step with a pair of tongs. Time and again I throw the paper down half read, and I have seriously thought of stopping it altogether, for I consider its presence in my family a contamination.”

“It is, in truth,” replied Mr. Leatherby; “it is worse than a contamination. It is corrupting; it has a degrading, brutalizing influence, that is, I am convinced, undermining the foundations of our moral structure. The daily press of to-day is one great engine of abuse, defamation, bad grammar, worse language and worst morals.”

“I can not see, for my part,” said Mr. Bartholomew, “why men can not discuss politics as freely, as earnestly, and as entirely free from acrimonious expressions and feeling, as purely exempt from abusive language of any kind, from any heat and anger, in fact, as they could discuss the grade of a street or the style of a coat.”

“And so think I,” said Mr. Leatherby. “I can not, for my part, conceive of an intellect so warped and narrow, a mind so shallow, that it can not carry on a discussion upon any question in politics without falling into the asperities, vulgarity, abusive detraction, and shameful slander that is the reproach and disgrace of the newspaper press.”

“It is a form of idiocy, I believe,” replied old Mr. Bartholomew. “It is an indication of a feeble mind that looks upon abuse as an argument, and bullying as logic. I am and always have been a Republican, but I can express my disapproval of many Democratic measures in a gentlemanly manner; and if I had not mind enough to keep my temper, I would consider that I had no right to talk politics.”

“You are perfectly correct,” rejoined Mr. Leatherby, earnestly; “and while we disagree on some points in political controversy, I being a life-long Democrat, yet we can freely and with mutual pleasure, and, I trust, profit, meet and discuss our differences in a friendly way, without giving way to the insane and detestable exhibition of temper, ignorance, and prejudice which marks the tone of the morning paper.”

“I had not noticed it so much in the _Hawkeye_,” replied Mr. Bartholomew, with a show of awakening interest in the conversation; “but when that trashy Democratic sheet that pollutes the evening air is brought to me by my neighbor, an ignorant dolt who can neither read nor write, but takes the paper as a party duty, and asks me to read it for him, I am amazed that the gods of truth and decency do not annihilate the infamous, puerile sheet with their thunderbolts.”

“You must bear in mind, however,” rejoined Mr. Leatherby, speaking a trifle louder than was necessary in addressing a companion whose hand was resting on his arm, “the _Gazette_ has such a tide of corruption, such an avalanche of political bigotry and villainy to rebuke, that its voice must be raised in order to be heard: and it must speak boldly, defiantly, and in the thunder tones of righteous denunciation, to startle the people into a realizing sense of the peril which threatens the country from Republican misrule and tyranny.”

“By George!” shouted Mr. Bartholomew, “the Republican party is the last, the only bulwark between the republic and eternal ruin. I tell you, sir, once let the Democratic party obtain control of this government, once let that infamous organization of political thieves, knucks, outlaws, and castaways take charge of our political machinery, and we will find ourselves in the hands of a horde of the most abandoned profligates, the most utterly unprincipled, the most vicious, demoralized, unconscionable, diabolical set of scoundrels that ever cheated the gallows.”

“By the long-horned spoon!” roared Mr. Leatherby, jerking his arm away from Mr. Bartholomew’s hand; “if the satanic and infernal plans of the Republican party were carried out, with all their attendant knavery and debauchery, this government would be a rule of branded malefactors and convicts, a government of felons, a penal colony in which the most hopelessly irreclaimable, graceless villains would administer the law. The bad faith of the Republican party, its ignominious record, its vicious tendencies, has shocked the Christian world, and----”

“You’re a liar!” yelled Mr. Bartholomew, “and you are just like the rest of your besotted, low-lived, ignorant class--a low, mean, pitiful, beggarly, unscrupulous and treacherous set, whose impudence in asking for the votes of honorable men is only equaled by your rapacious and unbridled greed for office; your----”

“You are an old fool!” howled Mr. Leatherby; “a censorious, clamorous, scurrilous, foul-tongued old reprobate, and I disgrace my name when I talk to you on the street. You mistake vituperation and abuse for argument, and you reply to a simple plain statement of facts with malignant and defamatory slander and calumny, because you can’t answer.”

“Shut up!” shrieked Mr. Bartholomew. “Don’t you say another word to me, or I’ll slap your ugly mouth! By George, I’ll kick your head off!”

“You can’t do it!” roared Mr. Leatherby, pulling off his coat, and dancing around Mr. Bartholomew. “I can lick the whole Republican party, from the big whisky thief and ring master in the White House down to the sneak thief that picks pockets at mass meetings! I can----”

“You’re a fighting liar, and you daren’t take it up!” howled Mr. Bartholomew, pulling off his coat.

Then Mr. Leatherby ran up and kicked him twice while he was struggling in the arms of his coat, but the old gentleman got loose in a flash and hit Mr. Leatherby a resounding thwack on the nose with his cane, and when Mr. Leatherby stopped to hold a handkerchief over his bleeding proboscis, Mr. Bartholomew got in a couple more real good ones with his cane; then Mr. Leatherby went for the rocks in the macadamized street. He broke two windows in a grocery before he hit Mr. Bartholomew, when he caught the old gentleman on the side of the head and dropped him. Then Mr. Bartholomew took to the stone pile and hit a young lady on the other side of the street, and Mr. Leatherby hurled a tremendous big rock, which missed the old gentleman and blacked the eye of a policeman who was coming to separate them, but was so incensed that he arrested them, and they were each fined $10 and costs for fighting in the street. And they both firmly believe that the unbridled hatred and unreasonable recriminations and abuse of the daily papers are iniquitous in their influence, and should be suppressed for the good of society.

* * * * *

It was a sad scene when the authorities took a poor man from Happy Hollow, and sent him out to the poor house. The parting between the poor man and his eleven dogs, which he distributed among his sympathizing relatives, was affecting in the extreme. We believe the man had a few children, too, but not enough to make a fuss about.

* * * * *

A bashful young man, while out driving with the dearest girl in the world, had to get out and buckle the crupper, and hesitatingly exclaimed that “the animal’s bustle had come loose.”

A THRILLING ENCOUNTER.

It happens, once in a while, that even the ordinary routine of the editorial sanctum is broken by incidents and scenes that are fairly dramatic in their character. As we write, there comes back to us the reminiscence of a quiet, sleepy Summer afternoon, only a few short years ago. The very flies in the sanctum buzzed lazily about the room, oppressed by the heat and the quiet loneliness of the place, when the door opened with a quick, sudden snap, and we turned and saw a woman stepping into the room. She was not old, and her face, haggard with care and seamed with trouble, still bore traces of great beauty. She came into the office with a quick, nervous tread, and there was a hunted look in her eyes that betrayed the fugitive. She closed the door behind her, and turned the key in almost the same motion, with the quick instinctive manner of a person who had fallen into the habit of isolating herself from observation and pursuit at every opportunity. She refused to sit down, but said:

“I can tell you all you will want to know about me in very few words--I am a fugitive.”

We told her we had guessed as much, and we besought her to confide nothing to us. We could not help her, we said; our duty as a journalist would not permit us to extend any aid to a person flying from the law. She said:

“I do not want you to aid me in farther flight; I am tired to death. My own conscience, more pitiless than the minions of the law, has pursued me for years with a whip of scorpions. I can not escape its terrible lashings. I can not fly from my punishment if I would, and I am anxious it should be over. Death would be a welcome relief, if it would but come.”

Again we told the panting, weary creature to tell none of her story to us, and advised her to go to the police headquarters and give herself into the hands of the law, which would deal justly, and, we had no doubt, in view of her sufferings and remorse, mercifully with her.

“I can not!” she exclaimed, covering her face with her hands, and breaking into convulsive sobs; “I can not, I can not. You do not know there are other hearts would ache if I gave myself up and told all. I want to tell my story to some one who will pity me and advise me. There are those whose hands are as dark with ineffaceable stains as mine are, but who do not suffer the mental agony that oppresses me. Shall I, in order to escape the lashings of my own conscience, consign these, whose lives are happy and whose hearts know no remorse, to the same punishment for which I yearn?”

We asked her (for our curiosity conquered our caution) if it was possible that one so young and fair was the center of a wide-spreading circle of crime that held in its horrid entanglements so many others beside herself?

“Aye,” she said, bitterly. “If I went to the gallows through a court of justice, I would lead with me, held by the same terrible links of evidence, a guilty train of men hardened in crime, and their hands steeped in innocent blood!”

“Woman, woman!” we exclaimed, in horrified tones, “in the name of heaven, who and what are you?”

“Oh, heaven help me!” she shrieked, in a voice that chilled our marrow--“I am old man Bender!”

A weird, wild whoop rent the silence of the sanctum--and the woman was alone. There was a sound as of a rising journalist scrambling up through the narrow copy tube, and the next instant a bare head, with a quill over one ear, burst through the hatchway in the roof, and, followed by a complete set of editorial anatomy, emerged, and running briskly to the rear wall of the building, disappeared down the lightning-rod, and was seen no more until the next day at three P. M.

We never saw the woman again, and wis not where she is, but we smile in bitter derision whenever we read that the police have arrested an old man answering the description of old man Bender.

FIVE WOMEN.

One afternoon five women went out on South Hill in a street car. One of them was a fat woman in a black dress, with a cameo pin as large as a stucco ornament. She breathed at a high pressure, about 103 to the minute. A woman with a thin, long neck, and sad eyes, and a Paisley shawl, sitting on the other side of the car, said, in a feeble voice:

“Good afternoon, Mrs. Waughop.”

“Oh, (puff) Mrs. Dresseldorff, (puff, puff,) how do (puff) you do?” (Puff, puff.)

“Oh, I ain’t feeling well at all. I’ve had so much trouble with my lungs, and nothing seems to do them any good. I’ve tried onion gargle, and three kinds of expectorant, and Wine of Tar, and two of Doctor Bolus’s prescriptions, and one of Dr. Bleadem’s, and a new kind of ointment, but nothing seems to have any effect on them. How do you feel to-day?”

“Oh,” groaned Mrs. Waughop, “I’m not getting on at all. My asthma is worse every day (puff, puff), and I can’t sleep at night, and I’m afraid I’ll have to give up entirely (puff, puff). I could hardly get out to-day (puff, puff, puff). I went to Greenbaum and Schroder’s and around to Guest’s and down to Carpenter’s (puff, puff), and into Parsons’ and up to Mrs. Voorhees’ (puff, puff), and down to Wyman’s and up to Wesley Jones’ and into Gus Dodge’s and (puff, puff, puff) down to the express office, and then by the time I had made a couple of calls out on North Hill and went to the doctor’s, I was as tired as though I had walked a mile (puff, puff, puff). I don’t know what’s going to become of me, I’m sure. How are you, this afternoon, Mrs. Dinkleman?” she continued, turning to the next woman, a lonesome looking female with a wart on her chin, who smiled dismally on being addressed and paused in the midst of a search for a street car nickel in the bottom of a black reticule as big as a hair trunk.

“I’m about half down with the chills,” she said, with a prolonged sigh; “I have such a fever every night, I don’t get two hours’ sleep out of the twenty-four, and I’m afraid I’ll be down sick before I get through with it. My eyesight is failing, too, and I have a constant headache that worries me nearly to death. I am glad, Mrs. Mulligan,” said Mrs. Dinkleman, turning to the fourth woman, “to see you able to be out.”

Mrs. Mulligan bowed feebly to the rest of the ladies. “Indeed I oughtn’t to be out,” she groaned, “I ought to be in bed this minute. I haven’t had this flannel off my throat for three weeks, and I’m afraid I’ll lose my voice entirely. I’ve had a misery across my back since I don’t know when, and I had to have three teeth pulled this blessed afternoon. I was that bad with the rheumatiz all last week I didn’t dare stir out of the house, and I’ve got a felon coming on my finger just as sure as I’m a living woman. What appears to be the matter with your face, Mrs. Gallagher?” she asked the last woman in the car.

“Neuralagy of the eyes,” the last woman, who wore black glasses and green goggles, remarked, in such lugubrious tones that they cast a gloom over the entire community, and the masculine occupants of the car wondered if there was a well woman in America.

THE GOBLIN GATE.

We once knew a most worthy man, whose irreproachable life was at one time threatened with mental and physical wreck, all on account of his front gate. He lived out on North Hill, with his charming wife and seven lovely daughters. He was a pale-faced, anxious-looking man, who moved about and looked and spoke as though he supped with sorrow seven times a week. He has, with all those seven lovely daughters, only one front gate, and that’s what made him pale. In one Summer he spent $217 repairing that front gate--putting in new ones, and experimenting with various kinds of hinges; and after all that, the gate swung all through the Winter on a leather strap and a piece of clothes-line--and there was peace in the household, and the man grew fat. But when the April days were nigh, it soon became apparent to the man that his troubles were at hand, and anxiety soon drove the roses from his damask cheeks and robbed his ribs of their substance. He used to climb over the back fence, to avoid calling attention to the disreputable looking old gate; but his self-denial was of no avail. One evening his eldest daughter, Sophronia, said:

“Pa, that horrid old gate is the most disgusting thing on Fifth Street. If you can’t afford to have it fixed, I’d take it away and put up a stile.”

And pa only groaned. But an evening or so later, his youngest daughter, Elfrida, came in and said, with considerable warmth:

“Pa! I wish you had that beastly old gate tied to your neck; that’s what I wish!”

And she dissolved in tears, and evaporated up stairs in a misty cloud, while her sisters followed slowly, casting reproachful glances at pa. And the next evening, his third daughter, Azalea, came bouncing into the room, about 9:30 P. M., with her gloves in a condition to indicate that she had been patting gravel, and said, with some energy, that if pa had no feeling, other people had; and she wished she was dead, she did; and she hoped that the next time pa went out of that hateful old gate, he’d fall clear from Fifth Street to the bridge, so she did. And she broke down, and disappeared with a staccato accompaniment of sobs and sniffles. And the next time pa went out of that gate, he found it prostrate between the two posts, and saw that the fragile strands of the clothes-line had parted, under some extraordinary pressure; and that was what ailed Azalea’s gloves. Pa saw there was nothing for it but a new gate, and he groaned aloud as he viewed the dreary prospect of furnishing gates to support the manly forms of the best young men of Burlington for another Summer. It soon became evident that he was getting up a gate he could match against time. He pondered, and pondered, and pondered. He became the confidant of carpenters; he was often seen guiltily showing certain plans and drawings to blacksmiths and cunning workers in iron and steel. And in due time he had a new gate up; a massive gate, with great posts, ornamental and substantial--and the seven sisters were pleased. They read the little brass plate, that informed them that a patent was applied for, and they saw the words, “For 130 pounds;” but they didn’t know what it meant until the gate had swung on the uneven tenor of its way about a week.

One evening, the weather, though sufficiently cool to be bracing; admitted a test of the new gate. A murmur of voices arose from the vicinity of that popular lovers’ retreat, as Sophronia swung idly to and fro on its heavy frame. Presently, a pale-faced, anxious-looking man, who was holding his hand upon his breast to still his beating heart, as he crouched in a dark corner of the porch, heard Rodolphus say:

“But believe me, Sophronia, my own heart’s idol, between the touches of the rude hand of time and the unkind----” As he began the word, he leaned forward and bent his weight upon the gate, and with a sharp click a little trap-door in the side of the post flew open, and a gaunt, many-jointed arm of steel, with an iron knob as big as a Virginia gourd on the end of it flew out, and, with the rapidity of lightning, hit Rodolphus two resounding pelts between the shoulders, that sounded like a bass drum explosion.

“Oh-h-h! gosh!” he roared, “I’m stabbed! I’m stabbed!” and, without waiting to pick up his hat, fled, shrieking for the doctor; while Sophronia rushed into the house, crying, “Pa! pa! pa! Rodolphus is shot!” and swooned. The pale-faced man said nothing, but shrank still further back into the shadow, and thrust his handkerchief into his mouth to stifle a smile. Pretty soon he knew the voice of his daughter Azalea at the gate, saying “Good night.” But a rich, manly voice detained her; and the measured swing of the gate was again heard in the distance. Soon he heard Lorenzo say, as he made ready to climb upon the gate:

“But whatever of sorrow may await our future, dear one, I would it might fall upon me----”

And just as he lifted his last foot from the ground, the trap opened, and the gaunt arm reached out and fell upon him, with that big knob, four times; and every time it reached him, Lorenzo shrieked:

“Bleeding heart! Oh, mercy, mercy, Mr. Man! Oh, murder!”

And as he ambled away in the starlight, wailing for arnica, Azalea fled wildly to her home, shrieking, “Oh pa, pa, pa! somebody is murdering Lorenzo!” And on the porch a pale-faced man thrust the rim of his felt hat into his mouth, to reinforce his handkerchief, and hugged himself in placid content. Pretty soon the man’s fifth daughter came home from a party, and she, too, perched on the gate; and, in a moment or two, Alphonso said:

“But, my own Miriam, would I could tell you what I feel for you----”

But he didn’t; for, just as he leaned upon the gate, the gaunt arm reached out and felt for him with about seventy-five pounds of iron, and knocked his breath so far out of him that he couldn’t shriek until he had run half a mile away from the house. And Miriam ran into the house, screaming that Alphonso had a fit.

And the pale-faced man rose up out of the shadow and emptied his mouth; and as he stood under the quiet starlight, looking at the gate whose powerful but delicate mechanism repelled every ounce of weight over 130 pounds, a look of ineffable peace stole over the pale face, and the smile that rested on the quiet features told that the struggle of a lifetime was ended in victory--and a gate had been discovered that could set at naught the oppressions of thoughtless young people.

THE AUTOMATIC CLOTHES-LINE REEL.

No one who lived in Burlington that year, can ever forget the first practical test that was made of the famous “Domestic Automatic” clothes-line reel. It was a curious and powerful bit of mechanism, and was the invention of a man who lived on Barnes Street. This man used to be grievously afflicted because the Scandinavian lady who superintended the weekly wash day ceremonies at his house always took great pains to leave a net work of clothes-line spread all around his back yard. And when he made complaint to her about it she addressed him in the musical accents of Christine Nilsson’s native language, and overwhelmed him with a torrent of eloquence that he could not understand. And when he remonstrated with his wife and daughter about it they laughed him to scorn, and his daughter, who was educated at Vassar, and can hustle her terrified parent out of the house with one hand, told him if he interfered any more in that department around that house he’d get drowned in the wash-tub. So this man suffered. One bitter cold Winter morning he ran out to the woodshed after some kindling, and the first line caught him under the chin and pulled his neck out till it was a foot long, and he ran into the house and frightened his wife into fits by his terrible appearance, and she threatened to apply for a divorce if he ever made faces at her that way again. It was nearly three hours before his neck shrunk back to its natural size. And a few nights after that, he was all dressed to go to a party with his family, and he went bounding down the back yard to see that the alley gate was fastened, and a slack line caught him amidships, let him run out the slack, and then when it hauled taut, just picked him up, tossed the breath out of him, turned him clear over, and chucked him down on his back, splitting his coat from the tail-buttons to the neck. And he couldn’t move, and he couldn’t speak, and he couldn’t even breathe, only about thirty cents on the dollar, so he couldn’t answer his wife and daughter when they screamed to him that they were ready, and they concluded that he had run away to avoid going with them, so they went off without him, and never came back till eleven o’clock, and the man lay out in the back yard all that time, trying to die. And one time after that, he was jogging across the back yard with his arms full of about three hundred pounds of hard wood, and he was laughing like a hyena at something he had read in _The Hawkeye_, when a clothes-prop slipped just as he passed under the line and dropped on his head, raising a lump as big as an egg, and as he fell forward, another line caught right in his mouth, and sawed it clear back to his ears, so that when he smiled the top of his head only hung on a hinge.

Well, these things naturally weighed on his mind and depressed him, but they set him to thinking, and he went to work and invented a patent clothes-line reel, which was inclosed in a heavy cast-iron box, and was worked by a powerful automatic arrangement. You only had to wind up the box and set it for a certain hour, just like an alarm clock, and at that hour the reel would go off, and pull on the line like a team of mules, the spring hook at the other end of the line would let go its hold, and that line would be rolled up at the rate of a thousand miles a minute. He said nothing about his invention, but put up the box and told some lie about it to his family, which is a way men have, and he set it for 7 o’clock P. M., and wound it up strong. Then he watched Miss Nilsson’s compatriot run out the line and adjust the hook, and he went away.

About 7 o’clock that evening, while he was toasting his feet at the fire and reading the almanac, the family were disturbed by unmistakable indications of a fight going on in the back yard between a hurricane and an earthquake, in which the earthquake appeared to be getting a little the best of it. The affrighted family rushed to the back door and looked out upon a scene of devastation and anarchy. The air was full of fragments of linen, and cotton, and red flannel, while shirt buttons, clothes pins, and little brass buckles, were flying like hail. The reel in the iron box was making about 60,000 revolutions a minute, and was whirling around like a thrashing machine, and the line was tearing around the posts like a streak of runaway lightning, and the clothes were trying to keep along with it, and around the posts they were ripping, tearing and snapping more than any cyclone that ever got loose, while where the line shot into the hawse-hole in the iron box, the striped stockings and white shirts and things, and flannels, and yarn socks, and undershirts and more things, and aprons, and handkerchiefs, and sheets and things, and pillow-slips, just foamed and bulged, and tossed wildly, and ripped, and tore, and scraped, until the yard and air were so full of lint that it looked worse than an arctic snow storm. Oh, it was dreadful. It was terrible. Everybody shrieked in dismay.

“Somebody’s at the clothes-line!” screamed the man’s daughter.

“Good heavens!” yelled the man, “hadn’t you taken the clothes in?”

“No!” chorused the women.

The man thought he would save what was left. He sprang at the clothes-line. He caught the flying hook at the end with both hands, and the next instant, before the terrified eyes of his shrieking wife and daughter, he was jerked through the hole in the iron box, a quivering mass of boneless flesh, while his glistening skeleton fell rattling upon the porch.

They gathered his frame work off the porch, and unlocked the box and drew out his covering. He was not dead, so deftly and quickly had he been removed from his framework. They sent for the doctors, but their skill could not avail to get the man together again, and now he sits, limp and boneless, in a high-backed easy chair, smiling sadly at his grinning skeleton, which sits in a chair on the opposite side of the fire-place, grinning sociably at its counterpart, and rattling horribly every time it crosses its bony legs, or scratches the top of its glistening head with its gaunt, fleshless fingers. And thus that poor man will have to drag out a dual existence until death comes to both of him. It is a painful, expensive life, for the skeleton eats just as much as the flesh, and the flesh has taken to smoking ten cent cigars, and the skeleton can’t sleep a wink unless it has a big hot whisky every night at bed time. And all this is the result of wicked, wicked carelessness. A terrible warning to women who leave the clothes-line up after dark.

INSPIRATIONS OF TRUTH.

Every year, so oft as the 22d of February comes, the day sacred to the memory of the father of his country is faithfully celebrated by two good boys of Burlington, who, if their lives are only spared, will yet be second editions of the immortal G. W. Last year, it was noticed by every one about the house, they were unusually good. They stayed home all the morning, and talked about Washington, and how he broke the mule and girdled the sassafras tree, and how good he was, and what a pity it was he had no middle name. Along in the afternoon their mother sent them to the church, where there was to be a festival, with a basket filled high with sweet home-made bread, and cold boiled ham, and roast chicken, and one thing and another. They took hold of the basket and plodded soberly and goodily toward the church. As they started down Division Street they saw a boy coming toward them whom they knew. He was the son of a neighbor, the blacksmith’s boy, with whom they had a feud of long standing; for on divers occasions he had caught these good brothers out, separately, and had rudely assaulted them, and fairly pounded the hair off their heads. He was a little too healthy for either of the boys alone, but the pair had sworn to make it lively for him if ever they lighted upon him together. So soon as they saw him they put down the basket and gave chase. He girded up his loins and fled, but the boys got themselves up and pursued after him and pressed him hard, and after a rattling chase of about two blocks, they encompassed him round about in a vacant lot, and fell upon him, and smote him insomuch that he begged for mercy and screamed for succor until he was black in the face. Then the victors, joyous returning from the fray, with light steps sought their long abandoned train. Imagine their dismay when, through the gathering twilight gloom, they saw somewhat less than one hundred and fifty thousand dogs, half buried in the basket, dividing and devouring the sutler stores contained therein. There was precious little left when the dogs were driven away, and the boys went home exceeding sorrowful, but hopeful. Their mother met them at the door, and took the empty basket from their hands.

“Who did you give the basket to?” she asked.

“Mrs. Featherstone, dear ma,” replied the elder George Washington.

“And what did she say?” asked their mother, for Mrs. Featherstone is an authority in church festivals.

“Oh,” chorused both George Washingtons, “she said it was the nicest basket that had come in all the afternoon.”

“And,” added the younger George, feeling that he wasn’t doing himself justice if he didn’t get in an independent statement, “Mrs. Lamphreys said she would give anything in the world if she could make such white bread as yours--she said it was wonderful how you done it.”

“Now, did she say that?” cried the delighted woman; for at the last sociable Mrs. Lamphreys said her bread was like bass-wood slabs.

“And Mr. Middlerib,” cried the elder G. W., fearful lest his younger brother should find favor and be exalted over him, “said there wasn’t such chickens anywhere in the State of Iowa outside of that basket.”

And then the younger held the age again, and the older chipped one, and the younger saw him and raised him, and then the older came in, and the younger stayed right by him, and they told all manner of things and compliments about and from all manner of people who were at the church, until the good woman, astonished and delighted at her sudden popularity, determined to go to the sociable, although she had not intended to do so. She went, and she looked in vain for her cake and ham and chicken. She returned home at an early hour, and roused her young George Washingtons from the sweet, innocent sleep of childhood. Then she took a skate strap, and after a brief but pointed cross-questioning on the evidence already brought forward, proceeded----. The rest is too awful.

SPIRIT PHOTOGRAPHY.

It must have been nearly three years ago, as nearly as we can remember, just about the time Monfort and Hill got to photographing ghosts, that a tall, pale man, with piercing black eyes and long hair, came to Burlington and opened a photograph gallery. He was a spirit photographer, and when his sitters received their pictures, for which they were expected to pay very roundly, lo, the spirit faces of dear ones who had gone before clustered around the face of the party whose photograph had been taken from life. There were plenty of people in the learned city of Burlington who were as fond of believing in supernatural things as are the outside barbarians. So, credulous men and women thronged to the spirit artist’s studio, the spirits came up to be photographed around their mortal friends by squads and platoons, and worldly dross, in the shape of a fluctuating and irredeemable currency, poured into the artist’s coffers, and he was happy. Among others who went to his studio, was a sad-eyed young man who is a genius. He never used to get home till two o’clock in the morning, because he was down in his office, he told the folks, burning the midnight oil, and committing the yearnings of a restless and ambitious genius to paper. He was supposed to be writing a book of poems, and, consequently, the fair ones who were privileged to enter the circle of his dreamy acquaintance, doted on him. When he went to have his photograph taken, the dearest girl in the world, the one who tells him what nice hands he has, and who rubs his head when his long hours of lonely study make it ache all the next day, accompanied him. He told her on the way down that he expected when his counterfeit presented itself on the albumenized card, the spirit faces of Byron, and Hood, and Macaulay, and Shakespeare, and Tom Moore, and Shelley would rise and cluster around him. She gasped hysterically, and, looking proudly at him, said she believed they would too, and wouldn’t it be nice? But he only sighed gloomily, as genius always sighs, and they entered the studio.

While the young man was posing himself the Professor told him that those who were nearest and dearest to him in his lonely hours would gather around him and kiss the clustering curls on his marble brow, and that no earthly power could keep them out of the camera. The young lady reiterated her opinion in regard to the “niceness” of such an arrangement, the young man put on a look of genius and gazed into the camera with the air of a man who is wondering where he can borrow three dollars; the artist dived under the cloth and in due time he stepped to the front with the picture and exhibited it to the poet and the adoring girl.

Spirits?

One or two of them. Right in the center was the young poet, gazing dreamily out into vacancy. And the spirits who cheered him in his lonely hours of study, and assisted him in the conflagration of the midnight oil, gathered around him, and never stirred or faded, not even when the poet ejaculated, “Oh lying horrors!” nor yet when the young girl shrieked and fell fainting with her hair caught in that forked thing the artist stands behind the subject to hold his head steady. For on the right of the poet there stood a spirit with a long slim neck whose name appeared to be “Whisky Cocktail,” and on the left there was a short, squatty spirit who was announced as just plain “Gin,” and then, clustering all around the young poet’s head, like an aureola, were “Straights,” whatever they are, “Grasshopper Punch,” “Log Cabin Cocktail,” “Old Tamarack,” “Eye Openers,” “Appetizers,” “Night Caps,” “Can’t Quits,” “Corpse Revivers,” “Coffin Nails,” “Indian Cocktails,” “Mountain Dew,” “Benzine,” “The New Drink,” “Fly Poison,” “What Killed Dad,” “The Same,” “Fast Freight,” “Bran’an Wa’r,” “Sherri’neg,” “Sudden Death,” “Crusade Drops,” “Commissary No. 3,” “Old Crow,” “Tangleleg,” “Forty Rod,” “Grim Death,” “Jimson Juice,” “Chain Lightning,” “Twelfth Resolution,” “That’s on Me,” “Temperance Tract,” “Quinine,” and several other spirits who were too far in the back ground to show their cards very distinctly.

The young man didn’t take another sitting, and he has since spent more time trying to convince “her” that this spirit photography is the greatest humbug that ever deluded a credulous people, than he ever spent with the spirits who share his lonely hours of midnight toil.

WRITING FOR THE PRESS.

Prof. Matthews, in his delightful book, “Hours With Men and Books,” devotes a chapter, and a very instructive chapter too, to advising and directing people who are determined to write for the press what to write and how to say it. But even in that special chapter Prof. Matthews has overlooked quite a number of important points which we, in our experience with occasional newspaper contributors, have come to look upon as absolutely essential to good correspondence. We have had, even in the usually infallible _Hawkeye_, some complaint, once in a while, from occasional correspondents about mistakes which have appeared in their articles when they come out in print. We are aware that in many cases the fault was our own, but we are confident all such trouble could be remedied if correspondents would pay a little more attention to the preparation of their manuscript. Printers are not always infallible, and proof readers do sometimes make mistakes, but we have prepared a few practical hints and instructions, and if people who write occasionally for the papers will only observe the following simple and practical rules, which are much easier to observe than Prof. Matthews’, they may be assured that their articles will always command the highest market price, which is seldom less than two cents a pound:

Never write with pen or ink. It is altogether too plain, and doesn’t hold the mind of the editor and printers closely enough to their work.

If you are compelled to use ink never use that vulgarity known as the blotting pad. If you drop a blot of ink on the paper, lick it off. The intelligent compositor loves nothing so dearly as to read through the smear this will make across twenty or thirty words. We have seen him hang over such a piece of copy half an hour, swearing like a pirate all the time, he felt that good.

Don’t punctuate. Editors and publishers prefer to punctuate all manuscript sent to them. And don’t use capitals. Then the editor can punctuate and capitalize to suit himself, and your article, when you see it in print, will astonish even if it does not please you.

Don’t try to write too plainly. It is a sign of plebeian origin and public-school breeding. Poor writing is an indication of genius. It’s about the only indication of genius that a great many men possess. Scrawl your article with your eyes shut, and make every word as illegible as you can. We get the same price for it from the rag-man as though the paper were covered with copper-plate sentences.

Avoid all painstaking with proper names. All editors know the full name of every man, woman and child in the United States, and the merest hint at the name is sufficient. For instance, if you write a character something like a drunken figure “8,” and then draw a wavy line, and then write the letter M and another wavy line, the editor will know at once that you mean Samuel Morrison, even though you may think you mean “Lemuel Messenger.” It is a great mistake to think that proper names should be written plainly.

Always write on both sides of the paper, and when you have filled both sides of every page trail a line up and down every margin, and back to the top of the first page, closing your article by writing the signature just above the date. How editors do love to get hold of articles written in this style. And how they would like to get hold of the man who sends them. Just for ten minutes. Alone. In the woods, with a gun.

Lay your paper on the ground when you write; the rougher the ground the better. A dry goods box or the side of the house will do if the ground is too damp. Any thing rather than a table or desk.

Coarse brown wrapping paper is the best for writing your articles on. If you can tear down an old circus poster and write on the pasty side of it with a pine stick, it will do still better.

When your article is completed, crunch the paper in your pocket, and carry it two or three days before sending it in. This rubs off the superfluous pencil marks and makes it lighter to handle.

If you can think of it, lose one page out of the middle of your article. The editor can easily supply what is missing, and he loves to do it. He has nothing else to do.

If correspondents will observe these directions, editors, in most instances, will hold themselves personally responsible for every error that appears in their articles, and will pay full claims for damages when complaint is made. We shall never forget the last man who complained at the _Hawkeye_ office under this rule. We can never, never, although we should live a thousand years, forget the appalling look he turned upon us while we were pulling his lungs out of his ear with the nail-grab. Our heart seemed to turn to ice, under the influence of that dumb beseeching look, while we tore him to pieces. We have never torn a man to pieces since without feeling the hot tears spring to our eyes as we think of that man. We have been tempted, time and again, to break ourselves of this habit of tearing men to pieces for trivial causes. But we digress. We were merely saying we are always happy to receive complaints and correct any errors for which we are responsible.

DANGERS OF BATHING.

As the warm weather raises the waters of the creeks and rivers to the temperature so inviting to the boys of the republic, a few instructive and general suggestions relative to bathing in the streams may prove the means of saving some juvenile lives. Boys are proverbially rash and reckless in almost everything they do, and are so apt to overdo whatever they undertake, except sawing wood or fastening the front gate, that too much wholesome advice on the benefits of abstinence can never be amiss in their cases. And especially is such advice necessary in regard to bathing, for when a boy makes up his mind to “go swimming,” he thinks of nothing in the world except getting into the water. And every year so many precious lives are endangered, and so much pain and misery caused by boyish, carelessness and thoughtlessness in this respect, that it is a solemn and important duty of journalism to warn the boys of the dangers that wait upon bathing parties, and instruct them how to avoid them. We therefore give a few rules, culled from the pages of personal experience, which, if properly observed by the boys of America, may save them no one can tell how much misery and suffering.

1. Always ask your mother if you may go down to the river with the boys to hunt carnelians. Mention the names of Sammie Johnson, and Robbie Gregg, and Ellis Haskell and Johnnie Chalmers, and Charlie Austin, and Wallie Colburn, and Dockie Worthington, all well-known “good boys,” who wash their faces every morning, keep their clothes clean, wear white-collars, and don’t say bad words, as the young gentlemen who are to comprise the party. A judicious and strict adherence to this rule has often obtained the necessary parental permission to visit the river shore, which would otherwise be sternly denied, especially if it should appear that Bill Slamup, and Tom Dobbins, and Jim Sikes, and Butch Tinker, and Mickey McCann, were the alternates who were confidently expected to represent the first named delegates in the convention.

2. Avoid going into the river in the vicinity of a lumber yard. The temptation to take pine boards from the lumber piles to swim on is too strong for many boys to resist. It is very pleasant, we know, to swim around on a nice broad plank, but the lumbermen do not always like it, and we have known a rough board, abruptly drawn from beneath the horizontal figure of a kicking, paddling, laughing boy, to fill him with remorse and slivers to an extent that would appear incredible were it not for the fact that the boy who loses his plank in this way has plenty of time to count his slivers as he pulls them out.

We knew a boy, twenty years ago, who swam off a plank in this way, and immediately afterward sat down on the sandy shore, and amid the unfeeling laughter and mocking sympathy of his colleagues, withdrew from his cuticle, beginning at the chin and ending at the toes, three hundred and seventeen well-developed average slivers, and four of a larger variety, denominated snags. And sometimes we wake up in the night, from happy dreams of childhood’s guileless days, and half believe we didn’t get all those slivers out then.

3. Avoid putting a bar of kitchen soap in your pocket before you leave home. It frequently gives the bather away entirely, being quickly missed from the sink, and readily detected about the person. And even if you get it safely to the river, and the first boy who “soaps himself” does not lose it in twenty feet of water, the “strocky” appearance of your hair, on your return home, instantly betrays the recent and extravagant use of resin soap, and grave consequences are apt to follow. Besides, you do not really need the soap, as is attested by your well-known aversion to it at home.

4. If convenient, bathe very near a railroad bridge. Then, when a passenger train comes thundering by, you can rush out of the water and dance and shriek on the bank. Travelers like this; and if your uncle Jasper, from Waterloo, or your father returning from Creston, should happen to be on the train and recognize you, they will tell you what the passengers said about it, and your father will be so pleased that he will assist you in a little physical exercise, so essential to the health after bathing. And then the next time you go in swimming you can show the boys your back--a spectacle in which they will take fiendish delight, which they will exhibit by imitating, in most expressive pantomime, the contortions, gestures, and outcries in which you were supposed to have indulged while your father was putting that back on you.

5. If you desire to get up a crowd to go swimming, signify your wishes by holding up your right hand, with the first and second fingers erect and spread apart like a letter V, and as many good boys as are ready, willing and anxious to run away and go with you, will respond by the same sign, and the party can easily be made up without fear of detection, in the presence of the unsuspecting preceptor, who is a graduate of a private school, and never had any fun.

6. Should any boy be so lost to honor as to desire to leave the water before the rest of the crowd wish to do so, he may be easily induced to return to the liquid element by gently tossing a handful of dry sand or dust upon his back, as nearly between the shoulders as may be. If there is a really good, unsophisticated boy in the crowd whose habit of wearing a white collar and carrying a clean handkerchief pronounces him a haughty aristocrat, the bad boys by getting dressed first and judiciously applying the sand to him as often as he “comes out,” can keep him in the water until his father comes to look for him. Then, the next afternoon he goes down with you to the river, you can look at his back, and have your revenge.

7. If a boy lingers in the water too long, it is sometimes advisable, in order that he may learn to abstain from indulging himself to such an intemperate extent in the future, to tie each sleeve of his shirt in a most terrific hard knot, right at the elbow. When this knot is dipped into the water, and a boy gets at each end of the sleeve, braces his feet and pulls for life, it may be drawn so tightly that it can not be drawn out with a stump machine. The boy who belongs to that shirt, after many vain endeavors, is either compelled to cut off the sleeves, or, _multis cum lachrymis_, go home with it buttoned around his neck and hanging down his back, like a drunken apron. This gives him away, bad, and the appearance of that weeping boy, plodding timorously and apprehensively homeward through the gloaming, and the variegated aspect of his back the next night, produce such a pleasant impression upon you, that for two weeks afterward, as your dear mother looks in at your room door, and sees you smiling in your sleep, she thinks the angels are whispering to you.

8. The most approved method of drying the hair is to shake it up rapidly with a pine stick. Never comb your hair smoothly before going home, no matter who offers to loan you a pocket-comb. A slick head of hair excites suspicion in the family circle on sight.

9. If, at the supper-table, the dreadful discovery is made by your mother or sister that your shirt is wrong side out, the best way to do is to own right up. Excuses are useless; and no mother or father of ordinary intelligence was ever misled by the assertion, however solemnly made, that the shirt was turned by reason of the boy too suddenly climbing a fence instead of going through the gate.

10. To get water out of your ears, lean your head over to one side, and kick out violently with one leg, while you pound your head smartly with the palm of your hand. It is an exploded fallacy that holding a warm stone to the ear will bring out the water.

There are some other rules which might be added to the above, but they are comparatively unimportant, and are so generally known that you can learn them by applying for information to the first bad boy you meet.

THE POWER OF DIGNITY.

The human heart, in all its expansive, limitless capacity for enjoyment, takes greater pleasure in nothing than in witnessing a portly, solemn-visaged man, the embodiment of natural dignity, importance in clothes, administer a scathing rebuke to some “smart” petty government official. One morning just such a personification of innate dignity loomed up at the stamp window of the post-office, and glared in gloomy and majestic displeasure at the busy clerk who registered a letter before he sprang to the window and asked the stately customer what he wished. The great man did not answer for several moments. He gazed steadily and impressively over the clerk’s head, and then asked, in ponderous tones:

“Is there any one hear-r-r-e who attends to business?”

The embarrassed clerk blushed, faltered for a moment, then, recovering himself, said, with characteristic and national cheerfulness, becoming an official of the Republic:

“I will see, sir.”

And he disappeared. He went into the other departments, tortured a carrier with an original conundrum, and heard a good story in the mailing room, and came back.

“Yes, sir,” he said to the great one, “there are, in addition to myself, three clerks in the letter department, one in the mailing room, four carriers, three route agents, the mail driver and a janitor.”

“Ah-h-h! I am glad there are so many. I may in all that number find one who is at his post.”

And then he looked as impressive as a special agent, and was silent for three minutes, while the humbled clerk awaited his orders, and impatient men behind him fidgeted and grumbled. Finally, the great man said with deep solemnity:

“I wish one three-cent stamp.”

The clerk tore off the stamp and held it, waiting for the consideration. The great man made a somewhat longer pause than usual; he felt in his various vest pockets; he gradually lost his look of impressive rebuke; his chest caved in, and he assumed the aspect of an ordinary frail mortal, and he said:

“Ah--the fact is--I’m sure--ah--in short, I find that I have carelessly left my purse at home--can you kindly--”

The clerk, with the faintest suggestion of triumph in his eye, brusquely waved the great man aside with--

“Sorry for you, sir; but the clerk who sells stamps on credit is not in. What does the next man want?”

And the great man, as he backed through the smiling crowd who stood around with money in their hands, felt somehow that his rebuke had been thrown away, and feared that if the case went to the jury without argument it would very probably bring in a verdict for the Government.

A CANDID CONFESSION.

There used to live down on Washington Street, a good man, who endeavored to train up his children in the way they should go, and as his flock was numerous he had anything but a sinecure in this training business. Only last Summer the elder of these male olive branches, who had lived about fourteen wicked years, enticed his younger brother, who had only had ten years’ experience in boyish deviltry, to go out on the river in a boat, a species of pastime which their father had many a time forbidden, and had even gone so far as to enforce his veto with a skate strap. But the boys went this time, trusting to luck to conceal their depravity from the knowledge of their pa, and in due time they returned, and walked around the house, the two most innocent looking boys in Burlington. They separated for a few moments, and at the expiration of that time the elder was suddenly confronted by his father who requested a private interview in the usual place, and the pair adjourned to the woodshed, where, after a brief, but highly spirited performance, in which the boy appeared most successfully as “heavy villain” and his father took his favorite role of “first old man,” the curtain went down and the boy, considerably mystified, sought his younger brother.

“John,” he said, “who do you suppose told dad? Have you been licked?”

John’s face will not look more peaceful and resigned when it is in his coffin than it did as he replied,

“No, have you?”

“Have I? Come down to the cow yard and look at my back.”

John declined, but said:

“Well, Bill, I’ll tell you how father found us out. I am tired of acting this way, and I ain’t going to run away and come home and lie about it any more. I’m going to do better after this, and so when I saw father I couldn’t help it, and went right to him and confessed.”

Bill was touched at this manly action on the part of his younger brother. It found a tender place in the bad boy’s heart, and he was visibly affected by it. But he asked:

“How did it happen the old man didn’t lick you?”

“Well,” said the penitent young reformer, “you see I didn’t confess on myself, I only confessed on you; that was the way of it.”

A strange, cold light glittered in Bill’s eye.

“Only confessed on me?” he said. “Well, that’s all right, but come down behind the cow shed and look at my back.”

And when they got there do you suppose John saw the first mite of Bill’s back? Ah no, dear children, he saw nothing bigger than Bill’s fists, and before he got out of that locality he was the worst pounded John that ever confessed on anybody. Thus it is that our coming reformers are made and trained.

A BURLINGTON NOVELETTE.