Bargains in Immortality
The undersigned offers for sale to the highest bidder, up to Doomsday next, several choice lots of tombstones. Bidders will state price and terms of payment, and accepted purchasers will remove the monuments from their present localities, at their own risk. The lots are:
1st. A gravestone of white marble. It is about 65 feet square at the base, and is the frustrum of a pyramid, truncated at about 140 feet. It is filled with a square hole, upon the sides of which are inscriptions let into various colored marbles, and in the languages of the peoples who inhabited a great country ages ago. The stone was designed to be put over the remains of PRO PATRIA, a personage once celebrated for loyalty and wisdom, but whose teachings are now well nigh forgotten, and whose name even is fast being obliterated from the memories of radical improvers of governments and republican institutions. This lot may be seen south of the mouth of Goose Creek, in a district called Columbia.
2d. A gravestone consisting of a square house of Illinois marble, with a piece of a smoke-stack protruding from the roof. About one-third of the estimated cost had been expended, when the persons who were to furnish the means suddenly concluded that the Little Giant could sleep just as well in a filthy unmarked hole in the ground, as under a pile of marble. Besides, being dead, he couldn't get any more offices for his constituents, so they found out they didn't care a cuss for him. Further information about this stone can be obtained by applying to any citizen of Chicago.
3d. A monument which we haven't seen, and so can't describe. It is supposed to be at Springfield, Illinois, and was intended for a person once called a railsplitter—a man much homelier than the typical hedge fence, but as good as homely. He was thought to be a second PRO PATRIA, MOSES, or some such person, and was sworn by, by millions of people who would now almost deny ever having heard of him. At the time he went out everybody wanted to put up a gravestone immediately—almost before he needed one. Now, everybody isn't altogether enough to provide one. For further particulars about the Springfield stone, inquire of any red-hot radical.
There are some other lots, but we will not offer them until we see how the present ones go off.
GHOUL, Undertaker.