Bouquets and Brick-Bats and Democracy.
There is never a rose without a thorn. This is official. Bouquets a-plenty have been showered upon me. Sir Thomas White once called me a great national asset—and I am glad he fortunately added the “et”; Collier’s wrote of me as the greatest imprinted wit unbound in Canada, and other dubbed me Ambassador in Chief of the C.P.R., while I have mistakenly been honored by being called the Mark Twain of Canada—save the Mark—and the British, Australasian, American and Canadian press representatives heaped eulogies and showered gifts upon me, and I never got a swelled head over it, because I had experienced bouquets with bricks in them. Once, when I filled the high and dignified position of chairman of the license and police committee in the city of Winnipeg, Chief Murray came to me one day and told me that Schmidt—I think that was his name—had half-a-dozen teams at work and only one license. I instructed him to make Mr. Schmidt, if that was his name, take out a license for each and every team, and the order was promptly and strictly carried out. The matter escaped my mind altogether, until one bright afternoon when entering a street car amongst whose passengers were several ladies of my intimate acquaintance. After bidding them the time of day, I went to a seat forward, where a fat German in a partially intoxicated condition was lolling. As I neared him, he a little gruffly wanted to know if I was Alderman Ham. Imagining he was one of the free and independent electors of Fort Rouge, which ward I was chosen to represent, I pulled down my vest, puffed out by bosom like a pouter pigeon, and courteously acknowledged that I was—in the blessed hope of securing an additional vote at the approaching election. But it’s the unexpected that always happens. He leered at me and shouted, so that everybody in the car could hear:
“You are, eh? Well, you are a damned old stinker.”
It was Schmidt, the teamster man. I didn’t mind that, but the ladies all heard him, and laughed immoderately, for which no particular blame could, would or should be, as the case may be, attached to them. But it knocked my high and mighty ideas of glorified officialdom into a cocked hat.
Another time, but there was no brick in this one, in travelling through the Canadian Rockies an American lady in the observation car asked the name of a particularly lofty mountain. Here, I thought, was an appreciative audience of one whom I could illuminate. I told her it was Mount Tupper, named after one of Canada’s greatest statesmen, and that on the other side was Mount Macdonald, called after Canada’s Grand Old Man, and that the two mountains had once been united, as Sir John and Sir Charles were, but that in the very long ago the irresistible forces of Nature had split them in twain. The lady seemed greatly interested, and I, in my middle-aged simplicity, went on to point out the “picturesque figure of the Hermit, which with cowl and faithful dog, carved out of hardened rock, had stood watch and ward all through the long centuries of past and gone ages, and that until eternity they would be on guard as living symbols of the wonderful works of an omniscient Creator.” And she said:
“My, how cute!”
Any aspirations I may have had concealed about my person of ever rivalling Demosthenes immediately subsided, and it gradually dawned upon me that as a silver-tongued orator I wasn’t even in the same class with William Jennings Bryan, Newton Rowell or Mayor Hylan of New York.
AT THE SAN FRANCISCO FAIR.
A GATHERING OF AMERICAN JOURNALISTS.