ANSWERS TO CORRESPONDENTS.
The editor of a city paper having occasion to take a trip into the country, prevailed upon me to assume the responsibility of answering letters from correspondents. The task is an onerous one—the more so as the editor, with that cunning ever noticeable in a person who takes the cream of a job, left me to reply only to the knottiest epistles. But I will some time get even with him, however. I will assume the editorial “we,” and should I waken the wrath of any person, he will be the sufferer. Here is a copy of my answer to “Katie:”—
“The minister was perfectly right in refusing to marry the couple, if, as you say, the bride insisted upon holding her poodle in her arms during the ceremony. The more so as the clergyman was near-sighted. He might possibly mistake the puppy for the bridegroom.”
Another person accuses a correspondent of a mis-statement. He says it was the editor of the Farmer, and not the editor of the Examiner, who planted the package of No. 16 homœopathic pills sent him from the country by a wag, as the seeds of a Sandwich Island cabbage.
The old editor for weeks regularly watered the plot where he sowed them; but as nothing appeared, wrote to the country gentleman, informing him that his seeds hadn’t sprouted, and he thought it likely they might have been taken from a dead head.
“Amy” is all in a fluster about spirits. I will talk to her after this manner:—
“We have always considered spiritualism the bluest carbuncle that ever festered upon the neck of society. We care not if the spirits were rapping around our table like a forty-stamp mill, we would eat our regular allowance with all the coolness that a Celestial manifests when absorbing his birds’-nest soup. If your bed dances a pas-seul after you get into it at night, there must be more than spirits around; and you would do well to throw a boot-jack or flat-iron under it before retiring. Such a proceeding might give you the satisfaction of hearing the spirits yell blue murder.
“There is not much danger of your going crazy, because, in plain terms, we consider you to be luny already. The poor fellow in the lunatic asylum who imagines Queen Victoria has made a private residence of his nose, and who has nearly blown both eyes out striving to eject her, is hardly more so.”
I trust the editor will lose some hair over that answer.
On second thought, I remember the editor has none.