Chicago, Feb. 20,1888.
FINANCIAL circles here have been a good deal interested in the discovery of a cipher which has been recently adopted by a depositor and which began to attract the attention at first of a gentleman employed in the Clearing House. He was telling me about it and showing me the vouchers or duplicates of them.
It was several months ago that he first noticed on the back of a check passing through the Clearing-House the following cipher, written in a symmetrical Gothic hand:
Dear Sir: Herewith find payment for last month's butter. It was hardly up to the average. Why do you blonde your butter? Your butter last month tried to assume an effeminate air, which certainly was not consistent with its vigor. Is it not possible that this butter is the brother to what we had the month previous, and that it was exchanged for its sister by mistake? We have generally liked your butter very much, but we will have to deal elsewhere if you are going to encourage it in wearing a full beard. Yours truly, W.
Moneyed men all over Chicago and financial cryptogrammers came to read the curious thing and to try and work out its bearing on trade. Everybody took a look at it, and went away defeated. Even the men who were engaged in trying to figure out the identity of the Snell murderer took a day off and tried their Waterbury thinkers on this problem. In the midst of it all another check passed through the Clearing House with this cipher, in the same hand:
Sir: Your bill for the past month is too much. You forget the eggs returned at the end of second week, for which you were to give me credit. The cook broke one of them by mistake, and then threw up the portfolio of pie-founder in our once joyous home. I will not dock you for loss of cook, but I cannot allow you for the eggs. How you succeed in dodging quarantine with eggs like that is a mystery to yours truly, W.
Great excitement followed the discovery of this indorsement on a check for $32.87. Everybody who knew anything about-ciphering was called in to consider it. A young man from a high school near here, who made a specialty of mathematics and pimples, and who could readily tell how long a shadow a nine pound groundhog would cast at 2 o'clock and 37 minutes p.m., on groundhog day, if sunny, at the town of Fungus, Dak., provided latitude and longitude and an irregular mass of red chalk be given to him, was secured to jerk a few logarithms in the interests of trade. He came and tried it for a few days, covered the interior of the Exposition Building with figures and then went away.
The Pinkerton detectives laid aside their literary work on the great train book, entitled "The Jerk-water Bank Bobbery and Other Choice Crimes," by the author of "How I Traced a Lame Man Through Michigan, and Other Felonies." They grappled with the cipher, and several of them leaned up against something and thought for a long time, but they could make neither head nor tail to it. Ignatius Donnelly took a powerful dose of kumiss, and under its maddening influence sought to solve the great problem which threatened to engulf the nation's surplus. All was in vain. Cowed and defeated, the able conservators of coin, who require a man to be identified before he can draw on his overshoes at sight, had to acknowledge if this thing continued it threatened the destruction of the entire national fabric.
About this time I was calling at the First National Bank of Chicago, the greatest bank, if I am not mistaken, in America. I saw the bonds securing its issue of national currency the other day in Washington, and I am quite sure the custodian told me it was the greatest of any bank in the Union. Anyway, it was sufficient, so that I felt like doing my banking business there whenever it became handy to do so.
I asked for a certificate of deposit for $2,000, and had the money to pay for it, but I had to be identified. "Why," I said to the receiving teller, "surely you don't require a man to be identified when he deposits money, do you?"
"Yes, that's the idea."
"Well, isn't that a new twist on the crippled industries of this country?"
"No; that's our rule. Hurry up, please, and don't keep men waiting who have money and know how to do business."
"Well, I don't want to obstruct business, of course, but suppose, for instance, I get myself identified by a man I know and a man you know and a man who can leave his business and come here for the delirious joy of identifying me, and you admit that I am the man I claim to be, corresponding as to description, age, sex, etc., with the man I advertise myself to be, how would it be about your ability to identify yourself as the man you claim to be? I go all over Chicago, visiting all the large pork-packing houses in search of a man I know, and who is intimate with literary people like me, and finally we will say, I find one who knows me and who knows you, and whom you know, and who can leave his leaf lard long enough to come here and identify me all right. Can you identify yourself in such a way that when I put in my $2,000 you will not loan it upon insufficient security, as they did in Cincinnati the other day, as soon as I go out of town?"
"Oh, we don't care especially whether you trade here or not, so that you hurry up and let other people have a chance. Where you make a mistake is in trying to rehearse a piece here instead of going out to Lincoln Park or somewhere in a quiet part of the city. Our rules are that a man who makes a deposit here must be identified."
"All right. Do you know Queen Victoria?"
"No sir; I do not."
"Well, then, there is no use in disturbing her. Do you know any other of the crowned heads?"
"No sir."
"Well, then, do you know President Cleveland, or any of the Cabinet, or the Senate or members of the House?"
"No."
"That's it, you see. I move in one set and you in another. What respectable people do you know?"
"I'll have to ask you to stand aside, I guess, and give that string of people a chance. You have no right to take up my time in this way. The rules of the bank are inflexible. We must know who you are, even before we accept your deposit."
I then drew from my pocket a copy of the SundayWorldwhich contained a voluptuous picture of myself. Removing my hat and making a court salaam by letting out four additional joints in my lithe and versatile limbs, I asked if any further identification would be necessary.
Hastily closing the door to the vault and jerking the combination, he said that would be satisfactory. I was then permitted to deposit in the bank.
I do not know why I should always be regarded with suspicion wherever I go. I do not present the appearance of a man who is steeped in crime, and yet when I put my trivial, little, two-gallon valise on the seat of a depot waiting-room a big man with a red mustache comes to me and hisses through his clenched teeth: "Take yer baggage off the seat!" It is so everywhere. I apologize for disturbing a ticket agent long enough to sell me a ticket, and he tries to jump through a little brass wicket and throttle me. Other men come in and say: "Give me a ticket for Bandoline, O., and be dam sudden about it, too," and they get their ticket and go aboard the car and get the best seat, while I am begging for the opportunity to buy a seat at full rates and then ride in the wood box. I believe that common courtesy and decency in America needs protection. Go into an hotel or a hotel, whichever suits the eyether and nyether reader of these lines, and the commercial man who travels for a big sausage-casing house in New York has the bridal chamber, while the meek and lowly minister of the Gospel gets a wall-pocket room with a cot, a slippery-elm towel, a cake of cast-iron soap, a disconnected bell, a view of the laundry, a tin roof and $4 a day.
But I digress. I was speaking of the bank check cipher. At the First National Bank I was shown another of these remarkable indorsements. It read as follows:
Dear Sir: This will be your pay for chickens and other fowls received up to the first of the present month. Time is working' wondrous changes in your chickens. They are not such chickens as we used to get of you before the war. They may be the same chickens, but oh! how changed by the lapse of time! How much more indestructible! How they have learned since then to defy the encroaching tooth of remorseless ages, or any other man! Why do you not have them tender like your squashes! I found a blue poker chip in your butter this week. What shall I credit myself for it? If you would try to work your butter more and your customers less it would be highly appreciated, especially by, yours truly, W.
Looking at the signature on the check itself, I found it to be that of Mrs. James Wexford, of this city. Knowing Mr. Wexford, a wealthy and influential publisher here, I asked him today if he knew anything about this matter. He said that all he knew about it was that his wife had a separate bank account, and had asked him several months ago what was the use of all the blank space on the back of a check, and why it couldn't be used for correspondence with the remittee. Mr. Wexford said he'd bet $500 that his wife had been using her checks that way, for he said he never knew of a woman who could possibly pay postage on a note, remittance or anything else unless every particle of the surface had been written over in a wild, delirious, three-story hand. Later on I found that he was right about it. His wife had been sassing the grocer and the butter-man on the back of her checks. Thus ended the great bank mystery.
I will close this letter with a little incident the story of which may not be so startling, but it is true. It is a story of child faith. Johnny Quinlan, of Evanston, has the most wonderful confidence in the efficacy of prayer, but he thinks that prayer does not succeed unless it is accompanied with considerable physical strength. He believes that adult prayer is a good thing, but doubts the efficacy of juvenile prayer.
He has wanted a Jersey cow for a good while, and tried prayer, but it didn't seem to get to the central office. Last year he went to a neighbor who is a Christian and believer in the efficacy of prayer, also the owner of a Jersey cow.
"Do you believe that prayer will bring me a yaller Jersey cow?" said Johnny.
"Why, yes, of course. Prayer will remove mountains; it will do anything.
"Well, then, suppose you give me the cow you've got and pray for another one."
MY DEAR SOX: We got your last letter some three days ago. It found us all moderately well though not very frisky. Your letters now days are getting quite pretty as regards penmanship. You are certainly going to develop into a fine penman your mother thinks. She says that if you improve as fast in your writing next year as you have last, you will soon be writing for the papers.
In my mind's eye I can see you there in your room practicing for a long time on a spiral spring which you make with your pen. I believe you call it the whole arm movement. I think you got the idea from me. You remember I used to have a whole arm movement that I introduced into our family along in the summer of '69. You was at that time trying to learn to swim. Once or twice the neighbors brought you home with your lungs full of river water and your ears full of coarse sand. We pumped you dry several times, but it did not wean you from the river, so I introduced the whole arm movement, one day and used it from that on in what you would call our curric kulum. It worked well.
Your letters are now very attractive from a scientific standpoint. The letters all have pretty little curly tails on them, and though you do not always spell according to Gunter, the capital letters are as pretty as a picture. I never saw such a round O as you make when you hang your tongue out and begin to swing yourself. Your mother says that your great-uncle on her side was a good writer too. He could draw off a turtle dove without taking his pen from the paper, and most everybody would know as soon as they looked at it that it was a turtle dove or some such bird as that.
He could also draw a deer with coil spring horns on him, and a barbed wire fence to it, and a scolloped tail, and it looked as much like a deer as anything else you could think of.
He was a fine penman and wrote a good deal for the papers. Your mother has got a lot of his pieces in the house yet, which the papers sent back because they were busy and crowded full of other stuff. I read some of these letters, and any one can see that it was a great sacrifice for the editors to send the pieces back, but they had got used to it and conquered their own personal feelings, and sent them back because they were too good for the plain, untutored reader. One editor said that he did not want to print the enclosed pieces because he thought it would be a pity to place such pretty writing in the soiled hands of the practical printer. He said that the manuscript looked so pretty just as it was, that he hadn't the heart to send it into the composing room. So the day may not be far away, Henry, when you can write for the press, your mother thinks. I don't care so much about it myself, but she has her heart set on it. Your mother thinks that you are a great man, though I have not detected any symptoms of it yet. She has got that last pen scroll work here of yours in the bible, where she can look at it every day. Its the picture of a hen setting in a nest of curly-cues made with red ink, over a woven wire mattress of dewdads in blue ink, and some tall grass in violet ink. Your mother says that this fowl is also a turtle dove, but I think she is wrong.
She says the world has always got a warm place for one who can make such a beautiful picture without taking his pen off the paper. Perhaps she is right. I hope that you will not take me for an example, for I am no writer at all. My parents couldn't give me any advantages when I was young. When I ought to have been learning how to make a red ink bird of paradise swooping down on a violet ink butterfly with green horns, I was frittering away my time trying to keep my misguided parents out of the poor-house.
I tell you, Henry, there was mighty little fluff and bloom and funny business in my young life. While you are acquiring the rudiments of Long Dennis and polo and penmanship, and storing your mind with useful knowledge with which to parlize your poor parents when you come home, do not forget, Henry, that your old sway-back father never had those opportunities for soaking his system full of useful knowledge which you now enjoy. When I was your age, I was helping to jerk the smutty logs off of a new farm with a pair of red and restless steers, in the interest of your grandfather.
But, I do not repine. I just simply call your attention to your priviledges. Could you have a Summer in the heart of the primeval forest, thrown in contact with a pair of high-strung steers and a large number of black flies of the most malignant type, "snaking" half-burnt logs across yourself and fighting flies from early dawn till set of sun, you would be willing, nay tickled, to go back to your monotonous round of base ball and Suffolk jackets and pest-house cigarettes. .
We rather expected you home some time ago, but you said you needed sea air and change of scene, so you will not be home very likely till the latter part of the month. We will be glad to see you any time, Henry, and we will try to make it as pleasant as we can for you. Your mother got me to fill the big straw-tick for your bed again, so that you would have a nice tall place to sleep, and so that you could live high, as the feller said.
I tried on the old velocipede pants you sent home last week. They are too short for me with the style of legs I am using this Summer. Your bathing pants are also too short for me, so I gave them to a poor woman here who is trying to ameliorate the condition of her sex.
I send you our love and $9 in money. We will sell the other calf as soon as it is ripe. Chintz bugs are rather more robust than last year, and the mortgage on our place looks as if it might mature prematurely. We had a lecture on phrenology at the school-house Tuesday night, during which four of our this spring's roan turkies wandered so far away from home that they lost their bearings and never came back again. So good-by for this time. Your father,
Bill Nye
IT HAS been my good fortune within the past ten years to witness a number of the remaining landmarks left to indicate the trail of the original inhabitant of this country. It has been a pleasure, and yet a kind of sad pleasure, to examine the crumbling ruins of what was once regarded, no doubt, as the very triumph of aboriginal taste and mechanical ingenuity.
I can take but a cursory glance at these earmarks of a forgotten age, for a short treatise like this cannot embrace minute details, of course.
We are told by the historian that there were originally two distinct classes of Indians occupying the territory now embraced by the United States, viz., the village Indians or horticultural Indians, and the extremely rural Indians or nonhorticultural variety.
The village Indians or horticulturalists subsisted upon fruits and grain, ground in a crude way, while the non-horticulturalists lived on wild game, berries, acorns and pilgrims.
Of the latter class few traces remain, excepting rude arrow heads and coarse stone weapons. These articles show very little skill as a rule, the only indication of brains that I ever discovered being on a large stone hammer or Mohawk swatter, and they were not the brains of the man who made it either.
The village Indians, however, were architects from away up the gulch.
They constructed a number of architectural works of great beauty, several of which I have visited. They were once, no doubt, regarded as very desirable residences, but now, alas, they have fallen into innocuous desuetude—at least that is what it looked like to me, and the odor reminded me of innocuous desuetude in a bad state of preservation.
In New Mexico, over 300 years ago, there were built a number of pereblos or villages which still stand up, in a measure, though some of them are in a recumbent position. These pereblos or villages are formed of three or four buildings constructed in the retrousse style of architecture, and made of adobe bricks. These bricks are generally of a beautiful, soft, black and tan color, and at a distance look like the first loaf of bread baked by a young lady who has been reared in luxury but whose father has been suddenly called away to Canada. The adobe brick is said to be so indigestible, in fact, that I am confident the day is not far distant when it will be found on every hotel bill of fare in our broad sin-cursed land.
One of these dwellings was generally about 200 feet long, with no stairways in the interior, but movable ladders on the outside instead. This manner of reaching the upper floor had its advantages, and yet it was not always convenient. One feature in its favor was the isolation which a man could pull around himself by going in at the second-story window and pulling the ladder up after him, as there was no entrance to the house on the ground floor. If a man really courted retirement, and wanted to write a humorous lecture or a $2 homily, he could insert himself through the second-story window, pull in the staircase and go to work. Then no one could disturb him without bribing a hook and ladder company to come along and let him in.
But the great drawback was the annoyance incident to ascending these ladders at a late hour in the night, while under the influence of Aztec rum, a very seductive yet violently intoxicating beverage, containing about eight parts cheer to ninety-two parts inebriate.
These residences were hardly gothic in style, being extremely rectangular, with a tendency toward the more modern dry-goods box. It is believed by abler men than I am, men who could believe more in two minutes than I could believe in a lifetime if I had nothing else to do, that those houses contained about thirty-eight apartments on the first floor and nineteen on the second. These apartments were separated by some kind of cheap and transitory partition, which could not stand the climatic changes, and so has gone to decay; but these Indians were determined to have their rooms separated in some way, for they were very polite and decorous to a fault. No Aztec gentleman would emerge from his room until he had completed his toilet, if it cost him his position.
I once heard of an Aztec who lived away down in old Mexico somewhere several centuries ago and who was the pink of politeness. He wore full-dress winter and summer, the whole year round, and studied a large work on etiquette every evening. At night he would undress himself by unhooking the german-silver ring from his nose and hanging it on the back of a chair.
One night a young man from the capital, named Ozone, or something like that, a relative of the Montezumas, came over to stay a week or two with this Aztec dude. As a good joke he slipped in and nipped the nose-ring of his friend just to see if he would so far violate the proprieties as to appear at breakfast time without it.
Morning came and the dude awoke to find the bright rays of a Mexican sun streaming in through his casement. He rose, and, bathing himself in a gourd, he looked on the back of the chair for his clothing, but it was not there. A cold perspiration broke out all over him. He called for assistance, but no one came. He called again and again, louder and still more loud, but help came not. He went to the casement and looked out upon the plaza. The plaza did not turn away. A Mexican plaza is not easily dashed.
He called till he was hoarse, but all was still in the house. Hollow echoes alone came back to him to mock him.
At night, when the rest of the household returned from a protracted picnic in the distant hills, young Ozone ascended the ladder which he carried with him in a shawl-strap, and entering the room of the Aztec dude gave him the nosering with a hearty laugh, but, alas! he was greeted with the wild, piercing shriek of a maniac robbed of his clothing; the man had suffered such mental tortures during the long, long day, that when night came, reason tottered on her throne. It is said that he never regained his faculties, but would always greet his visitors with a wild forty-cent shriek and bury his face in his hands. His friends tried to get him into society again, but he could not be prevailed upon to go. He seemed to be afraid that he would be shocked in some way, or that some one might take advantage of him and read an immoral poem to him.
ASHEVILLE, N.C., December 9.—There is no place in the United States, so far as I know, where the cow is more versatile or ambidextrous, if I may be allowed the use of a term that is far above my station in life, than here in the mountains of North Carolina, where the obese 'possum and the anonymous distiller have their homes.
Not only is the Tar-heel cow the author of a pale but athletic style of butter, but in her leisure hours she aids in tilling the perpendicular farm on the hillside, or draws the products to market. In this way she contrives to put in her time to the best advantage, and when she dies, it casts a gloom over the community in which she has resided.
The life of a North Carolina cow is indeed fraught with various changes and saturated with a zeal which is praiseworthy in the extreme. From the sunny days when she gambols through the beautiful valleys, inserting her black, retrousse and perspiration-dotted nose in to the blue grass from ear to ear, until at life's close, when every part and portion of her overworked system is turned into food, raiment or overcoat buttons, the life of the Tar-heel cow is one of intense activity.
Her girlhood is short, and almost before we have deemed her emancipated from calfhood herself we find her in the capacity of a mother. With the cares of maternity other demands are quickly made upon her. She is obliged to ostracize herself from society, and enter into the prosaic details of producing small, pallid globules of butter, the very pallor of which so thoroughly belies its lusty strength.
The butter she turns out rapidly until it begins to be worth something, when she suddenly suspends publication and begins to haul wood to market. In this great work she is assisted by the pearl-gray or ecru colored jackass of the tepid South. This animal has been referred to in the newspapers throughout the country, and yet he never ceases to be an object of the greatest interest.
Jackasses in the South are of two kinds, viz., male and female. Much as has been said of the jackass pro and con, I do not remember ever to have seen the above statement in print before, and yet it is as trite as it is incontrovertible. In the Rocky mountains we call this animal the burro. There he packs bacon, flour and salt to the miners. The miners eat the bacon and flour, and with the salt they are enabled to successfully salt the mines.
The burro has a low, contralto voice which ought to have some machine oil on it. The voice of this animal is not unpleasant if he would pull some of the pathos out of it and make it more joyous.
Here the jackass at times becomes a coworker with the cow in hauling tobacco and other necessaries of life into town, but he goes no further in the matter of assistance. He compels her to tread the cheese press alone and contributes nothing whatever in the way of assistance for the butter industry.
The North Carolina cow is frequently seen here driven double or single by means of a small rope line attached to a tall, emaciated gentleman, who is generally clothed with the divine right of suffrage, to which he adds a small pair of ear-bods during the holidays.
The cow is attached to each shaft and a small singletree, or swingletree, by means of a broad strap harness. She also wears a breeching, in which respect she frequently has the advantage of her escort.
I think I have never witnessed a sadder sight than that of a new milch cow, torn away from home and friends and kindred dear, descending a steep, mountain road at a rapid rate and striving in her poor, weak manner to keep out of the way of a small Jackson democratic wagon loaded with a big hogshead full of tobacco. It seems to me so totally foreign to the nature of the cow to enter into the tobacco traffic, a line of business for which she can have no sympathy and in which she certainly can feel very little interest.
Tobacco of the very finest kind is produced here, and is used mainly for smoking purposes. It is the highest-priced tobacco produced in this country. A tobacco broker here yesterday showed me a large quantity of what he called export tobacco. It looks very much like other tobacco while growing.
He says that foreigners use a great deal of this kind. I am learning all about the Tobacco industry while here, and as fast as I get hold of any new facts I will communicate them to the press. The newspapers of this country have done much for me, not only by publishing many pleasant things about me, but by refraining from publishing other things about me, and so I am glad to be able, now and then, to repay this kindness by furnishing information and facts for which I have no use myself, but which may be of incalculable value to the press.
As I write these lines I am informed that the snow is twenty-six inches deep here and four feet deep at High Point in this State. People who did not bring in their pomegranates last evening are bitterly bewailing their thoughtlessness to-day.
A great many people come here from various parts of the world, for the climate. When they have remained here for one winter, however, they decide to leave it where it is.
It is said that the climate here is very much like that of Turin. But I did not intend to go to Turin even before I heard about that.
Please send my paper to the same address, and if some one who knows a good remedy for chilblains will contribute it to the Sabbath Globe, I shall watch for it with great interest. Yours as here 2 4.
Bill N ye.
P.S.—I should have said relative to the cows of this State that if the owners would work their butter more and their cows less, they would confer a great boon on the consumer of both. B. N.
TO the general public I may say that I violate no confidence in saying that spring is the most joyful season of the year. But June is also a good month. Well has the poet ejaculated, "And what is so rare as a day in June?" though I have seen days in March that were so rare that they were almost raw. This is not a weather report; however. I started out to state that Central Park just now is looking its very best, and opens up with the prospects of doing a good business this season. A ride through the Park just now is a delight to one who loves to commune with nature, especially human nature.
The nobility of New York now turns out to get the glorious air and ventilate its crest. I saw several hundred crests and coats-of-arms the other day in an hour's time, and it was rather a poor day, too, for a great many of our best people are just changing from their spring to their light, summer coats-of-arms.
One of the best crests I saw was a nice, large, red crest, about the size of an adult rhubarb pie, with a two-year-old Durham unicorn above it, bearing in his talons the unique maxim, "Sans culottes, sans snockemonthegob, sans ery sipelas est."
And how true this is, too, in a great many cases.
Another very handsome crest on the carriage of the van Studentickels consisted of a towel-rack penchant, with cockroach regardant, holding in his beak a large red tape-worm on which was inscribed: "Spirituous frumenti, cum homo to-morrow."
Many of the crests contained terse Latin mottoes, taken from the inscriptions on peppermint conversation candies, and were quite cute. A coat-of-arms, consisting of a small Limburger cheese couchant, above which stood a large can of chloride of potash, on which was inscribed the words, "Miss, may I see you home?" I thought very taking and just mysterious enough to make it exciting.
Some day I am going to get myself a crest. I am only waiting for something to put it on. It will consist of a monkey with his eye knocked out and a bright green parrot with his tail pulled off, and over this the simple remark: "We have had a high old time," or words to that effect.
Not so many equestrians were out as usual on the day I visited the park, but those who were out afforded the observer a beautiful view of the park between their persons and the saddle. The equestriennes were more numerous, and one or two especially were as beautiful as anything that nature ever turned out. One young woman, in a neat-fitting plug hat, looked to me like a peri. It has been a good while now since I saw a peri, but I have always heard them very highly spoken of, and I hope she will not be offended when she reads these lines and finds that I regard her in that light.
Carriage-horses are dressing about as they did last season, except that pon-pon tails are more worn, especially at the end. Neck-yokes are cut low this year so as to show the shoulders of the wearer, and horses in mourning wear their tails at half-mast.
The porous plastron is not in favor this year, but many horses who interfere are wearing life-preservers over the fetlock, and sometimes a small chest-protector of russet leather over the joint, according to the taste of the wearer.
Polka-dot or half-mourning dogs are much affected by people who are beginning to get the upper hand of their grief. Much taste is shown in the selection of dogs for the coming season, and many owners chain their coachman to the dog, so that if any one were to come and try to abduct the dog the coachman could bite him and drive him away. A good coachman to take care of a watch-dog is almost invaluable.
A custom of taking the butler along in the seat with the coachman is growing in favor for two reasons: First, it shows that you have a butler, and, second, you know that while he is out with you he is not putting paste in the place of your diamonds at home. So I had almost said that it paste to do this.
The automatic or jointless footman is still popular, and a young man who has a good turning-lathe leg and an air of impenetrable gloom can get a job most any time.
Many New York gentlemen who are fond of driving take their grooms out to Central Park every afternoon for an airing. This is a wise provision, for those who have associated much with grooms will agree with me that a little airing now and then is just what they need.
There ought to be a book of park etiquette printed soon, however, for the guidance of its patrons. In the first place, it should be considered.
Autre for a gentleman to hire a coupe by the hour in order to recover from alcoholic prostration, and then sleep up and down the drive with his feet out the window. It is not respectful, and besides that the blood is liable to all rush to his head.
Drunken cab-drivers, too, should not be permitted to drive in the park, for only a little while ago one of them is said to have fallen from his high perch and injured his crest.
A park policeman should be specially detailed as a breath tester to stand at each entrance and smell the breath of all drivers and other patrons of the park. Let us enforce the law.
But the most curious feature about the exhibition afternoon spin in the Park is the great prevalence of mourning symbols. Almost, if not quite, one-third of the carriages one meets is decorated with black in every possible way, till sometimes it looks like a runaway funeral procession.
Why people should come to Central Park to advertise their woe by means of long black mourning tassels at their horses' heads and a draped driver with broad bands of bombazine concealing the russet tops of his boots, sometimes dressed in black throughout, is more than I can understand.
The honest, earnest and genuine affection of a good woman for a worthy man, alive or dead, is too sacred to treat lightly and the love that survives the wreck and ruin of gathering years has inspired more than one man to deeds of daring whereby he has won everlasting renown, but the woe that is divided up among the servants and shared in by the horses is not in good taste, it is not in good order and there are flies on it.
It is like saying to the world come and see how I suffer. It is parading your sore toe in Central Park, where people with sore toes are not supposed to congregate. It is like a widow wailing her woe through the "Want" column of a healthy morning paper. It is, in effect, saying to Christendom, come and hear me snort and see me paw up the ground in my paroxysms of wild and uncontrollable anguish. My grief is of such a penetrating nature and of that searching variety that it has broken out at the barn, and even the horses that I bought two weeks after the funeral, with a part of the life insurance money, have gone into mourning, and the coachman who got here day before yesterday from Liverpool has tied himself up in black bombazine and takes special delight in advertising our sorrow.
I do not believe that it will always be popular to wear mourning for our friends unless we feel a little doubtful about where they went.
Black is offensive to the eye, offensive to the nose, and it makes your flesh crêpe to touch it. Will the proofreader please deal gently with the above joke and I will do as much for him sometime.
Henry Ward Beecher had the right idea of the way to treat death, and when at last it came his turn to die his home and his church both seemed to say: "The great preacher is gone, but there is nothing about the change that is sad."
There is something the matter with grief that works itself up into black rosettes and long black banners that sweep the ground and shut out the sky and look like despair and feel like the season-cracked back of a warty dragon.
But wealth has its little eccentricities and we must bear with them. But he alone is indeed rich who is content and who does not look under the bed every night for an indictment. Look at poor old Mr. Sharp, with his stock of Aldermen depreciating on his hands—men for whom he paid a big price only a few years ago and who would not attract attention now on a ten-cent counter, while he don't feel very well himself.
No, I would not swap places with J. Sharp and ride through Central Park behind a pair of rip, snorting horses, with mourning rosettes on their heads, and feel that I must hurry back to help select an unprejudiced jury. I would rather hang on to the brow of a Broadway car till I got to Fifty-second street, and then stroll over to the menagerie and feed red pepper to the Sacred Cow and have a good, plain, quiet time than to wear fine clothes and be wealthy and hate myself all the time. I believe that I am happier in my untroubled, dreamless sleep on my quiet couch, which draws a salary during the daytime as an upright piano; happier browsing about at a different restaurant each day, so that the waiters will not get well acquainted with me and expect me to give them the money that I am saving up to go to Europe with; happier, I say, to be thus tossed about on the bosom of the great, heaving human tide than to have forty or fifty millions of dollars concealed about my person that I cannot remember how I obtained.
I dislike notoriety, and nothing irritates me more than the coarse curiosity of people who ride at night in the elevated trains and peer idly into my room as I toil over my sewing or go gayly about humming a simple air as I prepare the evening meal over my cute little portable oil stove, and though I have not courted this interest on the part of the people, and though I would prefer to live less in the eye of the public, I feel that, occupying the position I do, I cannot expect to wholly consult my own wishes in the matter, and I am content to live quietly and enjoy good health rather than wear good clothes and feel rocky all the time.
I would rather have a healthy alimentary
Than he garnished all over with passementerie.
WHEN Patrick Henry put his old cast-iron spectacles on the top of his head and whooped for liberty, he did not know that some day we would have more of it than we knew what to do with. He little dreamed that the time would come when we would have more liberty than we could pay for. When Mr. Henry sawed the air and shouted for liberty or death, I do not believe that he knew the time would one day come when Liberty would stand knee deep in the mud of Bedloe's Island and yearn for a solid place to stand upon.
It seems to me that we have too much liberty in this country in some ways. We have more liberty than we have money. We guarantee that every man in America shall fill himself up full of liberty at our expense, and the less of an American he is the more liberty he can have. If he desires to enjoy himself, all he needs is a slight foreign accent and a willingness to mix up with politics as soon as he can get his baggage off the steamer. The more I study American institutions the more I regret that I was not born a foreigner, so that I could have something to say about the management of our great land. If I could not be a foreigner, I believe I would prefer to be a Mormon or an Indian not taxed.
I am often led to ask, in the language of the poet, "Is the Caucasian played out?" Most everybody can have a good deal of fun in this country except the American. He seems to be so busy paying his taxes all the time that he has very little time to mingle in the giddy whirl with the alien. That is the reason that the alien who rides across the United States on the "Limited Mail" and writes a book about us before breakfast wonders why we are always in a hurry. That is the reason we have to throw our meals into ourselves with a dull thud, and hardly have time to maintain a warm personal friendship with our families.
We do not care much for wealth, but we must have freedom, and freedom costs money. We have advertised to furnish a bunch of freedom to every man, woman or child who comes to our shores, and we are going to deliver the good whether we have any left for ourselves or not.
What would the great world beyond the seas say to us if some day the blue-eyed Mormon, with his heart full of love for our female seminaries and our old women's homes, should land upon our coasts and find that we were using all the liberty ourselves? What do we want of liberty anyhow? What could we do with it if we had it? It takes a man of leisure to enjoy liberty, and we have no leisure whatever. It is a good thing to keep in the house "for the use of guests only," but we don't need it for ourselves.
Therefore, I am in favor of a statue of Liberty Enlightening the World, because it will show that we keep it on tap winter and summer. We want the whole broad world to remember that when it gets tired of oppression it can come here to America and oppress us. We are used to it, and we rather like it. If we don't like it, we can get on the steamer and go abroad, where we may visit the effete monarchies and have a high old time.
The sight of the Goddess of Liberty standing there in New York harbor night and day, bathing her feet in the rippling sea, will be a good thing. It will be first-rate. It may also be productive of good in a direction that many have not thought of. As she stands there day after day, bathing her feet in the broad Atlantic, perhaps some moss-grown Mormon moving toward the Far West, a confirmed victim of the matrimonial habit, may fix the bright picture in his so-called mind, and remembering how, on his arrival in New York, he saw Liberty bathing her feet with impunity, he may be led in after years to try it on himself.