Stephen H. Branch’s Alligator.
NEW YORK, SATURDAY, MAY 1, 1858.
Listen!—On Saturday last we arose with the glorious sun, and went to our printing office, and found the printer’s devil asleep in his dingy bunk. We applied a bodkin, and he sprang at us like a tiger. We grappled, and discovering that he had an Editorial Alligator by the throat, he released his grasp. We then banged the gong, and the printers appeared, like the imps in Robert the Devil, from the infernal regions. We then placed our leviathan form on the press, and lit the faggots, and puff, puff, went the machinery, like the drums and trumpets in Musard’s Express Train Gallop. We filled our carpet bag with Alligators, and flew like a whirlwind to the wholesale newspaper merchants in Beekman, Nassau, and Ann streets, where we found a plumed battalion awaiting the advent of the Alligator. The wholesalers, and retailers, and newsboys approached us in platoons, and clasped our fervent hands until they squeezed them into icicles, and we cried for quarter, and returned to our printing office, for another carpet bag of Alligators, which we sold on our way to Ann street, and returned again, and again, and yet again, for Alligators, until the weary sun retired to his downy bed in the bleak peach and potato fields of the Jerseys. Our printing office was besieged throughout the day, for Alligators, and on our return from Ann street the second time, we found our office stairs so thronged with applicants for Alligators, that we had to meander a dark alley, and ascend a ladder, and enter our office through a window. During the day, several bloody collisions transpired on the stairs, between the newsboys, in their struggles for the Alligators, as they emanated from our electric presses; and in one of the desperate conflicts, the Police were summoned to preserve the public peace. And, altogether it was a most laborious and exciting day for us, and at early twilight we were weary and worn, and retired soon after the curfew strains expired on the evening air. But we had an awful nightmare, in which we soliloquised in tones so stentorian, (about newsboys and Alligators,) as to arouse and terrify a venerable nervous gentleman in the next apartment, who thought we were either fighting or dying, and he rapped against the wall with his poker until he awoke us. While on the eve of our emergence from the nightmare, we dreamed that a colossus spider was devouring our proboscis, at which we levelled a Hyer blow,
When pure blood oozed from our nose,
Like water from Sikesy’s hose,
which aroused us, and we darted into the bath room, and applied the healing Croton without effect, and had to dam our nostrils with putty, which checked the copious effusion of blood, but which made us talk in nosy and twangy accents. In about an hour, the putty became thoroughly saturated and drippy, and we had to make fresh applications, and ultimately the putty dam was victorious. But our eyes are rather crimson, and we have fearful rumbling sounds in our ears, resembling distant thunder, and the bugle in the mountains, and we fear our nostrils are in a state of inundation, and that our blood will effect a passage through our eyes or ears, and rush wildly into the open air. But we checked the blood, and leaped into our couch, and off we went, like a patriotic rocket, into a slumber like that of the pure and sweet Amena, in the chamber of Rudolpho, and was no farther molested with horrible dreams of the newsboys and Alligators.
