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Recently there has been resurrected and regalvanized a story that was first told in Music-Hall by Theodore Parker on June Nineteenth, Eighteen Hundred Fifty-six. The story was about as follows:

Once in a stagecoach there was a man who carried on his knees a box, on which slats were nailed. Now a box like that always incites curiosity. Finally a personage leaned over and said to the man of the mysterious package:

“Stranger, may I be so bold as to ask what you have in that box?” “A mongoose,” was the polite answer.

“Oh, I see–but what is a mongoose?”

“Why, a mongoose is a little animal we use for killing snakes.”

“Of course, of course–oh, but–but where are you going to kill snakes with your mongoose?”

And the man replied, “My brother has the delirium tremens, and I have brought this mongoose so he can use it to kill the snakes.”

There was silence then for nearly a mile, when the man of the Socratic Method had an idea and burst out with, “But Lordy gracious, you do not need a mongoose to kill the snakes a fellow sees who has delirium tremens–for they are only imaginary snakes!” “I know,” said the owner of the box, tapping his precious package gently, “I know that delirium-tremens snakes are only imaginary snakes, but this is only an imaginary mongoose.”

And the moral was, according to Theodore Parker, that, to appease the wrath of an imaginary God, we must believe in an imaginary formula, and thereby we could all be redeemed from the danger of an imaginary hell. Also that an imaginary disease can be cured by an imaginary remedy.

Theodore Parker died in Florence, Italy, in Eighteen Hundred Sixty, aged fifty years. His disease was an excess of Theodore Parker. His body lies buried there in Florence, in the Protestant cemetery, only a little way from the grave of Elizabeth Barrett Browning.

At his funeral services held in Boston, Emerson said:

Ah, my brave brother! It seems as if, in a frivolous age, our loss were immense, and your place can not be supplied. But you will already be consoled in the transfer of your genius, knowing well that the nature of the world will affirm to all men, in all times, that which for twenty-five years you valiantly spoke. The breezes of Italy murmur the same truth over your grave, the winds of America over these bereaved streets, and the sea which bore your mourners home affirms it. Whilst the polished and pleasant traitors to human rights, with perverted learning and disgraced graces, die and are utterly forgotten, with their double tongue saying all that is sordid about the corruption of man, you believed in the divinity of all, and you live on.