LAST CHANCE TO COOL OFF!
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EXCURSION

To the Mirth-provoking Region of

EARTH

On Saturday, December 18.

(Next day Sunday, giving ample time to get back—also
to recover and look sober)

BASEBALL AT THE BATTERY.

The committee guarantees the game, not the quality of the playing. Umpire Shylock promises to make the score as close as his nature will permit. This is the line-up:

• Count Ercolo Antonio Matthioli—Mask Wearers—Louis Duc de Vermandois.
• Ananias—Fancy Twirlers—Munchausen.
• Napoleon—First Sack—Louis XIV.
• Boswell—Middleman—Sancho Panza.
• Herr Bismark—Where the Keg Is—Rip Van Winkle.
• Tweed—Hole in the Wall—Quay.
• Nero—All Out—Alexander.
• Beau Brummel—Centre of Attraction—Ward McAllister.
• Bobbie Burns—Where the Daisies Droop Their Heads—Longfellow.
• N. B.—Only dead-head tickets accepted. Get pasteboards from the committee. Reception. R. s. v. p.

Noah, Chairman,
P. T. Barnum,
Captain Kane.

All that week Noah’s personally-conducted excursion to earth was the one topic of conversation. The Stygianites ceased to watch the thermometer and even forgot to stone the clerk of the weather bureau. It was the burning question of the hour in Hades and smouldered for several days.

Two days after it had been posted, I joined the group reading the circular for the ’steenth time.

“Is Noah capable of being at the helm?” asked Napoleon. “His record indicates that all he knows could be printed on a postage stamp without cancelling the stamp.”

“He may be behind the times,” volunteered Methuselah, “but at least you must give Noah credit for knowing enough to come in out of the rain, which is more than could be said of most of the people of his day and generation.”

“To my knowledge,” quoth Alexander, “there are but two instances recorded of our good friend Populi going wrong; first, when he refused to follow Noah into the Ark before I was born; second, when he failed to elect yours truly as custodian of the keys to the hall of fame.”

“What mean the mystic letters ‘R. s. v. p.’?” asked Columbus, re-reading the circular.

“Being an Italian, you Ought to know Greek,” I rejoined, becoming first Ade to the injured Dooleyism, who didn’t Seem to get My Dust. Some Pagan Spaniards can’t see an American joke without Housetop Comment in Capital Letters. But I had gone Too Far to Ring Off, so I spoke in a Tone like an English check: “It’s a Foreign Phrase used by Americans in inviting People They Don’t Want. Translated into United States R. s. v. p. reads: Rush in; shake hands; Victual up; Pull Out. Moral: Don’t be Inquisitive, for if I read History and the Zodiac aright, it’s a Cinch that you’ll have to hide your Elongated Flappers by Retreating to the Shadows of the Tall Cedars.”

“Revenons a nos moutons, redacteur,” protested Napoleon, who abhorred slang and preferred his followers and his fables without any morals. To be called an editor made me quite willing to come back to the subject—even reporters are susceptible to flattery.

“Anything that will distract one’s attention from the thermometer is welcome,” said young Lochinvar. “Can you wonder that a lover sighs like a furnace in this heated season when one sizzles by degrees? Alas! there are no summer girls in Hades, for they exist only in the shadow of an ice cream parlor. But I object to the company of Jonah on the excursion. He would hoodoo the whole trip and some of us wouldn’t get back to the Styx alive!”

Just then Izaak Walton joined the group.

“I wonder,” he said, “what Jonah’s mother-in-law said when he returned home and told that story of the whale as his excuse for remaining out three nights. Other men tell variations of the same story, but they make them less fishy.”

“By the bye,” I put in, “it seems to me the Morman has the biggest kick coming against his wives’ mothers, yet I’ve never heard a word of complaint from any of them. How do you account for that, prophet?”

“Speaking from experience, I would say that one mother-in-law is quite enough to have in a family unless a man is fond of excitement,” answered Joe Smith.

“Boswell, what have I said on that subject,” asked Dr. Johnson. “I hate to repeat myself, but having said everything that’s worth saying, it’s up to Boswell.”

“If every Johnson had his Boswell, Washington might come into his own,” said that general. “But I suppose I ought to be satisfied, for am I not the father of my country?”

“You seem to think you are the father of the whole world,” snapped Adam, who was jealous of the American. “That distinction belonged to me when your country was still shrouded in the mists of the unknown. I have talked with all the historians and as far as I can learn, you are the father of no one and certainly not of your country. You aren’t even a Pilgrim Father and if all Americans followed in the footsteps of their first president, vital statistics would be less satisfactory to Roosevelt than they are. Now, when I was a boy—”

“Listen to the oldest inhabitant,” jeered Washington. “Adam recalls his boyhood days with extraordinary vividness for a man who never had any.”

“You may have been first at banquets and first in the hearts of your countrymen,” continued Adam, “but you weren’t first in the heart of your wife. As you married a widow, some man must have been ahead of you there.”

“Then there’s that old cherry tree fable which ought to have been uprooted from the school-books long ago,” said Ananias, who also had an axe to grind. “It’s unfortunate for the perpetuation of truthfulness that the only offspring of the father of his country is a chestnutty cherry tree, with a few chips lying on the ground.”

Baron Munchausen gave George Washington a resounding slap on the back.

“You ought to give up being a pattern of veracity and take to writing fiction,” he said. “An historical novel by General Washington would be the Great American Novel which publishers have announced for the last hundred years and which many authors have thought themselves bald-headed trying to produce.”

“I understand that after the ball game, Tennyson will write ‘The Charge of the Eleven.’”

“Isn’t he wrong in his numeral? Baseball is a nine, which is somewhat of a discrepancy.”

“Oh, that’s poetic license!”

“May I be Shakespearean a moment?” asked Lord Bacon.

“You cannot, even for a moment,” declared the Bard of Avon. “I allow no infringements on my copyright.”

“Don’t get excited,” returned milord. “All shades look alike to me and it would be a poor expert who couldn’t prove you were somebody else by your signature. Besides, who is Shakespeare anyway? The sweets of notoriety are not for you. You have never been interviewed, your picture does not figure in any patent-medicine advertisement, and no phonograph record repeats your blankety-blank verse without variation. Why, Bill, in these days you couldn’t pass an examination in Shakespeare without the assistance of half a dozen books of notes, a glossary, and five professors to tell you what you meant. To be the writer of a coon song is to be famous; to pen ‘Hamlet’ is simply to provide food for bookworms.”

“Let’s arbitrate,” suggested Æsop.

“None of your fables for mine,” said Shakespeare, slangily. “You would designate two dogs; I would select two cats; they would call in a fox for the odd. The arbitrators would come to talk it over. I would smile and rub the cats’ fur the right way. You would fill the dogs with porterhouse steak rare, broiled till the air for miles around would be rich with the odor, and served with butter gravy. I would cram the cats with liver and cream. You would turn the fox loose in the chicken yard and give him the run of the goose pasture. Oh, I know how arbitrations are run, whether they be conducted by cats or by capital!”

“This is no occasion for petty jealousies,” remonstrated Izaak Walton. “I would rather cull flowers just now from the banks of a trout stream than train for a prize fight. Hip! hip! hip! for the Hippodrome! Have you forgotten that you are going to exchange Hades for New York, where you can pull the sky over you for cover, use the moon in place of an incandescent light, the four points of the compass for bed posts and a morning shower for an alarm clock? We are going to find rest near the heart of Nature, where bookmakers are unknown and politicians have no higher ambition than to sit on a rail fence and dream of whittling down the salaries of the school teachers when they get a place on the board of education.”

“Boss” Tweed smiled for the first time since his election as janitor of the hall of fame.

“Noah may have a map of the road to the millennium,” he said, “but he has gotten side-tracked if he thinks New York is one of the stations along that route!”