THE financial flare-up is going round. It has penetrated the modest shanty of Jones, in our street.
“It was late when you came home last night, my dear,” said Mrs. J. at breakfast yesterday morning. When that lady addresses her husband with the affix of “my dear,” Jones recognizes a disturbed condition of the domestic atmosphere. He has had solemn experiences of the way Mrs. Jones works up a tea-table tornado. Therefore, Jones said nothing. He couldn’t say less; he was afraid to say more.
“I repeat, my dear, it was late when you returned home last night.”
Jones admitted there was nothing particularly premature about the hour in question.
“Perhaps, my dear, you wouldn’t find your feelings much hurt if I wished to know where you spent your evening.”
“Well, you see, love,” began the marital martyr, “there’s a sort of a kind of a description of—you don’t understand these things, Maria, but we’re plunged into the throes of a commercial crisis, and I thought—that is, we thought—a few of us thought, you know—a whole lot of us thought that we’d have a consultation, you understand—to—to avert anything in the shape of a pecuniary panic about these diggings.”
“Oh, you consulted, then?”
“Yes; we deliberated. We put our heads together, as it were, and we decided on a whole lot of things.”
“What time did you decide on breaking up?”
“Well, we had very important matters to discuss. You know the Jewish financiers—Baron Rothschild, and—and the rest of the Rothschilds, and the chief rabbis—and—and—and—all of them synagogue fellows, they’ve been working the oracle—and they’ve had a slap at the Barings.” Here Jones gasped for breath. He felt that somehow he wasn’t explaining matters as lucidly as was necessary.
“I think,” interposed Mrs. Jones, “that you’ll have a slap at the almshouse before you die, at the rate—the poor rate—you’re going on. What else?”
“Well,” desperately; “Maria, I must say that women can’t grasp the monetary situation. Don’t you understand that there’s been a withdrawal of gold from the Bank of England, and they’ve raised their rate to six per cent., and there’s been a heap of failures, and, in fact, things have gone so far that, that—”
“That you were so far gone when you came back last night that you took your boots off at the door-step, and tried to go to sleep on the scraper. And when you landed up-stairs in your bedroom you told me that you were at a meeting to pull the Czar of Russia over the coals about the atrocities on the Jews. You showed me the minutes of the proceedings. They were in your inside pocket, in a pint bottle labelled ‘Duffy’s Malt.’ Then you said there was a European war just hatching in the Herzegovina. You wanted to demonstrate the position of the Austrians and the Russians out there. You tried to do it with the wash-hand basin, the coal scuttle, and the fire-irons. You sat down in the coal scuttle, and you stood on your head in the wash basin, and I’m sure you swallowed some of the irons, for I can’t find the tongs anywhere. Then you tried to make a speech to the milkman out of the bedroom window this morning; and now it’s all a commercial crisis. Do you know what I got in your coat this morning, Mr. Jones? A hairpin, you wretch! A woman’s hairpin, you antiquated sinner! And there were two or three hairs round it, red hairs, you crooked-eyed deceiver! I have stood treachery, Mr. Jones, I have put up with your tantrums and your goings out and comings in for five years, Mr. Jones, but I can’t, I won’t, I shan’t be bamboozled any longer with your pint bottles of Russian atrocities and your red-headed commercial crisis, the hussy.” At this stage Mr. Jones effected a remarkably rapid retreat, but he has been heard to observe since that it is really astonishing what an effect a bank-break in London can have in a quiet kitchen in South Boston.
I’M sick of music. I’m surfeited with music. I’m engulphed in an ocean of music. I’m buried beneath a mountain of music. The air I breathe is oxygenized with music. The food I eat is flavored with music. I go to sleep to the tootle of the flute next door; my slumbers are oppressed with the nightmare of a solo on the trombone by a demon across the way, and I wake to the crash of a grand piano that some fallen angel with forty-horse-power wrists tortures in the semi-detached gentlemanly residence at the back. In short, I live in a locality that is so utterly utter in the matter of harmonic proclivities that I feel wild enough to undermine and blow it to splinters. The sound of the explosion would be a welcome change.
But I have had revenge. Ha! ha! It was temporary, but bliss is brief. For six weeks the pianist behind my bedroom has been ringing the withers of my soul matutinally with selections from Wagner. For two months the trombonist over the way has been tearing my vitals asunder by his frantic efforts to extort unhallowed tones from his instrument. For a fortnight the flutist next door has congealed my blood with variations on the “Carnival of Venice.” They have had one night from me. They won’t want another this side the Day of Judgment.
I gave a musical party. I summoned to my aid my brother who plays the melodeon. I called to my assistance my friend who lets the tempest of his heart loose into the cornet. I obtained the powerful alliance of my cousin who exercises his muscles on the double-bass. I invoked the tremendous services of an Aberdeen acquaintance, who has been practising for ten years on the Scotch bagpipes, and still survives. I appealed successfully to patriotic passions and pecuniary prejudices, and secured the presence of a fife and drum—principally drum—band from a Grand Army post.
The first part of the concert lasted two hours. By the end of that time all the boarders in the street had given their landladies notice to quit, and I had received three deputations from the outraged inhabitants of the disturbed district.
But my scheme of vengeance was only budding. I had generously plied the perspiring performers with copious draughts of Pilsener and Canada malt, till they felt fit for anything in the way of a musical monstrosity or instrumental indignity I could ask them to perpetrate on the suffering locality. Then I marshalled them out in the backyard, and implored them, as a last personal favor, to make themselves at home, and let each artist give vent to his feelings in his favorite tune. They vented. The bagpipes squealed out the “Reel of Tullochgorum,” till it seemed as if all the pigs in the States had joined in shrill lament over Armour’s interference with their happiness. The cornet pealed forth “Killarney” with energy enough to drown the roar of Niagara. The double-bass growled like a thunder-storm in its last agonies an operatic overture that I had never heard before, and I hope never, never to listen to again. The melodeon struggled manfully with “Nancy Lee,” and the fife and drum band wrestled desperately with “Patrick’s Day,” except half a dozen or so of its members, who got up a fight in one corner, and added a choice assortment of yells, shouts, and profane expressions to the glories of the occasion.
It was gorgeous. In ten minutes we had three fireengines and a division of police in the street; in half an hour there were several attempts at suicide of leading residents of the locality; and before our “grand finale” was finally done with there wasn’t a juvenile or adult within half a mile that didn’t feel he or she had had music enough to last a lifetime.
If I am disturbed any more by the operators round me, I shall give them another dose of my orchestra. I will. I have sworn it.
WE have an amiable tallow-chandler and soap-boiler in our street, who certainly should have been a novelist. I firmly believe he could give weight to Baron Munchausen, Jules Verne, M. de Chaillu, or the London Times in the matter of exaggeration, and romp in an easy winner. The whoppers that spreader of lies and light can tell would raise the hair on the head of an Egyptian mummy.
But he met his match last week.
I happened to be in our club-room with Dipps, when there entered an acquaintance of mine, a gentleman who aspires to legislative honors. Of course Congressional candidates must acquire the art of so embellishing and embroidering the naked truth as to make it attractive. Well, my friend has been studying this science, and he has advanced so far that he can dispense with facts altogether now. His enemies aver that the truth isn’t in him. I wouldn’t say that myself. I think it is in him—very much in him—it’s impossible to get it out of him.
I didn’t think of this, or I wouldn’t have introduced him to Dipps. I regretted it on the spot. Dipps was smoking a peculiar pipe. The future member noticed it. He made some slight remark about it. Dipps was all there. He replied on the instant that that was the identical pipe that Napoleon III. was smoking when he surrendered at Sedan. He had procured it from a wandering Teutonic troubadour, who had picked it up when the Emperor dropped it to hand his sword to his German conqueror.
The statesman expressed no surprise. He merely observed that by a strange coincidence he possessed the stump of the cigar which had fallen from Marshal MacMahon’s lips when his eleventh horse was shot under him at Worth. He had purchased the souvenir from a Zouave with two wooden legs and a glass eye, who had secured the half-finished weed and was smoking it out when a fragment of a shell drove it and a couple of teeth into the back of his head, from which they were extracted by the regimental surgeon. He had one of the teeth, too, fitted into his own gums. He showed it to Dipps.
I could see Dipps was rather staggered. He changed the subject. He exhibited his walking-stick. Remarkable stick, that. It was manufactured out of one of the railway carriages blown into the river on the night of the terrible Tay bridge disaster, in Scotland. At the risk of his life, a diver had brought up a panel out of that carriage for the express purpose of making that stick.
The embryo representative had another coincidence on hand. He had another walking-stick at home—made out of the thigh bone of the engine-driver of that ill-fated train. It was too ghastly a memento to carry about with him; but he could show it to Dipps at any time, and would point out the half-cooked appearance of a portion of it, arising from the fact that the driver was in the habit of sitting on the boiler in cold weather to warm himself.
Dipps was silent after this for a few minutes. But he wasn’t going to be put down without a desperate effort. He drew out his large scarf-pin. He called our attention to what appeared to be a drop of water in the centre of the colorless stone. No, the stone was not real. It was not a diamond. It was far more precious. That small dewy globule inside was worth a hundred diamonds of its size. It had been borne from the mystic shores of Lake Nyanza by a mighty traveller. It had passed into Dipps’s hands by a miracle. It was the tear Livingstone had shed when he first met Stanley. And Dipps smiled a lofty smile at the coming Daniel Webster, which said, as plainly as a candle-contriver’s grin could say anything, “Trot out your curiosities, now, old man, and match that if you’re able.”
Hang me if that expectant recruit to the ranks of the legislators didn’t squelch Dipps with a third coincidence. It was extraordinary—it was almost fabulous, he said, but he had another breastpin which contained a companion tear to Dipps’s. The knight of the soap-pan flatly denied the assertion. Livingstone had only shed one tear; that tear hadn’t been divided into suitable lots; it remained intact, complete, unmutilated, and he (Dipps) was its proud possessor.
“I didn’t say,” gently interposed the coming victim of some future Tom Reed, “I didn’t say that I had the tear Livingstone shed when the advent of the New York Herald Central African tourist pumped that saline particle up. No, sir; but I have a lachrymose relic equally enthralling in the interest which it must inspire.”
“Pooh!” snorted Dipps contemptuously, “what have you, what can you have, that approaches within a hemisphere of my historic, geographic treasure?”
“My friend,” replied the next man to be counted in his absence by the Speaker, “I do not grudge you the tear that Livingston shed when he embraced Stanley, for know that I have the identical tear that Stanley didn’t shed on that occasion, nor since, that I’m aware of.”
FOOTNOTES:
[A] This incident was recorded at the time in the Irish newspapers, was debated in Parliament, and formed the subject of rich comic cartoons in Pat, the Weekly News, the Weekly Freeman, and United Ireland.
[B] Rory, or Capt. Moonlight, is the latest cognomen for the Ribbon or Whiteboy avenger of landlord oppression.
[C] During the period of Irish obstruction in Parliament, the Speaker or Chairman of the House of Commons had frequently to preside for twenty or twenty-four hours at a stretch, during a debate, in the course of which the Irish members would raise points of order every five minutes or so.
[D] Allen, Larkin, and O’Brien, executed at Manchester, England, for their share in the rescue of Col. Kelly and Capt. Deasy, two Fenian leaders, were buried in the prison grounds, their bodies being refused to their relatives lest their funeral should be made the occasion of a demonstration.
[E] On this day William Philip Allen, Michael O’Brien, and Michael Larkin were hanged in Manchester, England, for the rescue of two Fenian leaders. Until the sentence of death was actually carried into effect it was not believed that the first political execution since that of Robert Emmet would take place. A mass meeting was held at the Old Swan Cross in Manchester, to welcome the reprieve, but their messenger brought news of the execution instead.
[F] Allen—nineteen years old.
[G] O’Brien—A brave Union soldier, who had fought in Meagher’s Irish Brigade.
[H] Larkin—An elderly man, who left a widow and four orphans.
[I] At the explosion which took place in the Tower of London on Jan. 23, 1885, the Grenadier Guards and the Police distinguished themselves by their frantic efforts to escape from the building.
[J] In April, 1885, the Prince of Wales paid a visit to Ireland. On the morning of his arrival a placard containing the verses above was found posted on every dead-wall in the cities and villages of Ireland. The poem had previously appeared in an American paper.
[K] A victim of English law, whose innocence was proven after he had been executed.
[L] Give me a kiss.
[M] Calcraft was a notorious English hangman, and Price a British jailer, whose brutalities to Irish political prisoners will be remembered for years.