FullReads

….”About the first of next month,” says a pious contemporary, “we shall discontinue the publication of our paper in this city, and shall remove our office and fixtures to–, where we hope for a blessing upon our work, and a share of advertising patronage.”

A numerous editorial staff of intelligent jackasses will accompany the caravan. In imagination we behold them now, trudging gravely along behind the moving office fixtures, their goggle eyes cast down in Christian meditation, their horizontal ears flopping solemnly in unison with their measured tread. Ever and anon the leader halts, uprolls the speculative eye, arrests the oscillation of the ears, laying them rigidly back along the neck, exalts the conscious tail, drops the lank jaw, and warbles a psalm of praise that shakes the blind hills from their eternal repose. His companions take up the parable in turn, “and the echoes, huddling in affright, like Odin’s hounds,” go baying down the valleys and clamouring amongst the pines, like a legion of invisible fiends after a strange cat. Then again all is hush, and tramp, and sanctity, and flop, and holy meditation! And so the pilgrimage is accomplished. Selah! Hee-haw!

…. A man in California has in his possession the rope with which his father was hanged by a vigilance committee in ’49 for horse-stealing. He keeps it neatly coiled away in an old cheese- box, and every Sunday morning he lays his left hand reverently upon it, and with uncovered head and a look of stern determination in his eye, raises his right to heaven, and swears by an avenging God it served the old man right!

It has not been deemed advisable to put this dutiful son under bonds to keep the peace.

…. A contemporary has some elaborate obituary commendation of a boy seven years of age, who was “a child of more than ordinary sprightliness, loved the Bible, and was deeply impressed with a veneration for holy things.”

Now we would sorrowfully ask our contemporary if he thinks flattery like this can soothe the dull cold ear of young Dobbin? Dobbin p�re may enjoy it as light and entertaining reading, but when the resurrecting angel shall stir the dust of young Theophilus with his foot, and sing out “get up, Dobbin,” we think that sprightly youth will whimper three times for molasses gingerbread before he will signify an audible aspiration for the Bible. A sweet-tooth is often mistaken for early piety, and licking a sugar archangel may be easily construed as veneration for holy things.

…. A young physician of Troy became enamoured of a rich female patient, and continued his visits after she was convalescent. During one of these he had the misfortune to give her the small-pox, having neglected to change his clothes after calling on another patient enjoying that malady. The lady had to be removed to the pest-house, where the stricken medico sedulously attends her for nothing. His generosity does not end here: he declares that should she recover he will marry her-if she be not too badly pitted.

Apparently the legal profession does not enjoy a monopoly of all the self-sacrifice that is current in the world.

…. A young woman stood before the mirror with a razor. Pensively she twirled the unaccustomed instrument in her jewelled fingers, fancying her smooth cheek clothed with a manly beard. In imagination she saw her pouting lips shaded by the curl of a dark moustache, and her eyes grew dim with tears that it was not, never could be, so. And the mirrored image wept back at her a silent sob, the echo of her grief.

“Ah,” she sighed, “why did not God make me a man? Must I still drag out this hateful, whiskerless existence?”

The girlish tears welled up again and overran her eyes. Thoughtfully she crossed her right hand over to her left ear; carefully but timidly she placed the keen, cold edge of the steel against the smooth alabaster neck, twisted the fingers of her other hand into her long black hair, drew back her head and ripped away. There was an apparition in that mirror as of a ripe watermelon opening its mouth to address a public meeting; there were the thud and jar of a sudden sitting down; and when the old lady came in from frying doughnuts in the adjoining room she found something that seemed to interest her-something still and warm and wet-something kind of doubled up.