ARTEMUS WARD.
_AND OUT OF PURGATORY._
ARTEMUS WARD’S LECTURES TO POOR, PERISHING HUMANITY.
LECTER I.
You’ll remember, relatives and nabors, how I crost the Atlantic Ocean and never agin set foot on my native soil. I naterally thought my opportunities there, in the British Mooseum and with those Egyptian Carcusses dun up in rags, and remaining for the space of six days and six nights with a skeleton grinning at me and pointing its long skinless fingers in my face and looking in an awful licentious manner, showing its pivoted legs—I say I naterally thought such an unheard-of experience would have prepared me for “the awful change” that follered. But it didn’t.
One nite, cummin’ hum from the Mooseum, where I had been instructin’ and elevatin’ several thousand pussons, male and female, I innocently swallered a fog—swallered it hull. I’d bin swallerin on ’em ever since I’d bin in England, but that night I took in a bigger one than ever, and it made me _sick_.
I sent for the physicians that received the patronage of the noble lords and dooks and they made me _sicker_; and finally for the physicain “to her most gracious majisty the Queen of Great Britain,”—but their aristocratic attention to me was of no use. As I lie tossing on what is known as “the bed of pain,” I seed a big light coming through the dark towards me. Behind that light appeared a grim skeleton, just like the pictur of Death in the Alminack, walkin’ on tiptoe toward me; and quicker than a wink he put out his long bony hand and touched me—firstly, in the pit of the stomach, so I couldn’t holler; nextly, he pressed his finger tips on my eye-balls, and they sunk right back into their sockets.
I tried to shake him off, and to yell, but I couldn’t! Then I knew I was “dun fur.” Next came what a printer’s devil would call a —— blank.
I was skeered out of my seven senses, and when I cum to and tried to recolect myself, I was like the old woman in the song who fell asleep, and
“By came a pedlar and his name was Stout
And he cut her petticoats all round about;
He cut her petticoats up to her knees,
Which made the old woman begin for to freeze.”
I was in the same predicament, for I was now only in my bare bones, and knew I was a rolecking old skeleton.
Wall, it gin me an awful shock to find myself like a skull and cross-bones on a tombstone, sittin’ on my own coffin!
Presently I was grappled by a big worm with a hundred legs. He then sent for his feller worms, and they licked me from skull to toe-jint. After I had stood the lickin’ as long as I could (they tickled so), I concluded to run away, so I started on a full gallop, and arter I had run awhile, where should I fetch up but in the vicinity of Vic’s Palace. I know’d by pussonal experience suthin’ of the feelin’ manner with which the British public look upon the Royal Family, and a sensation of relief cum over my mind as I thought if I once entered their ground no one dared foiler me. So I gin a spring and leaped right atop of the middle chimny. Owin’ to private considerations, I did’nt mind the soot, but I clambered down, and there I was, to my amazement, rite in the private apartments of the Queen. She was sittin’ at a table lookin’ at a dogerotipe of Prince Albert; and I walked straight up to her, not feel in’ a bit afeared, and making my manners, axed her if I didn’t resemble the Prince?—rememberin’ that the preacher had kindly said over my coffin that “there was no distinction in the grave.”
I thought that as I was a pooty gay image of Death, I might remind her of the “Prince Consort.”
She looked up kinder sideways as I spoke, but she must have bin a leetle hard o’ hearing, for she shook her head.
Then I thought I’d try her on another tack. So I placed my hands on my shakey knees, and bendin’ over in this guise, so she could see me plainly, while my teeth rattled in my skull as I shook my head at her and growled:
“Haint you afeared of me, Madam?” With the pirsistent obstinacy of the feminine gender, she refused to notice me. So I thought she was kinder “set up on her pins,” and I shouted louder:
“Victoria _Brown_! Aint you afeared of me? Aint you afeared I’ll tell Prince Albert of your _dooins_?”
At that she gin an awful yell, and flung herself down upon a yaller satin divan, trimed with gold, and slobbered it all over with tears.
I know’d then I had a “_mission to perform_,” and that my fleshless bones were not given me for useless pleasure, but as a “warnin’ to my race.”
Arter this adventer I left the palace as I had entered it, “leavin’ not a trace behind me.”
Since that affair, I have bin goin’ about “doin’ good,” frightnin’ the wicked into fits, and follerin’ in the steps of the parsen, and thus working my way out of Purgatory.