Brian heard of this. It became the one burning ambition of his soul to take a shorthand note of the Boston-baked-beans-color orator. He set out for Tanganyika to carry out his project. Accompanied by a dozen sons of night he penetrated the African jungle, swam its turgid rivers, evaded its hungry tribes, escaped its fierce animals, and after weeks of adventure and suffering, with his faithful followers, reached the king’s kraal the evening before one of that monarch’s speeches.
He had been scalped, had all his teeth drawn, lost a few toes, been once half boiled, and on another occasion baked nearly to a sweet and toothsome brown; still he had survived.
But, alas! he had lost his pencil and note-book, and these indispensable adjuncts of caligraphic civilization were unknown in Mtesa’s territory since Stanley had left.
Our reporter, however, had an inventive intellect not to be thwarted by such trifling obstacles. He hunted up a chalk ridge, and when the Cicero in jet addressed his subjects, Brian planted his Zanzibari attendants on their hands and knees, and took the speech in chalk upon their naked backs.
Mtesa, in return for the promise of a copy of the paper containing the speech, furnished the stenographer and his animated note-books with an escort to the coast, and triumph would have crowned Brian’s effort but for the most striking passages of the oration being lost through one of the blacks sitting down on a wet bank before he had been transcribed!
A POLITICAL LESSON SPOILED.
HE was a Boston teacher, and of course had an intellect superior to the cut-and-dry theories of instruction that were followed by the common herd of schoolmasters. He believed in object-lessons; in illustrations that should catch the young idea on the fly, as it were. Thus, when he wanted to fix in the memories of the youthful scholars the titles of the principal reigning monarchs and rulers of Europe, he didn’t keep them for half an hour each day iterating monotonously, “the Queen of England,” “the President of France,” “the King of Italy,” “the Emperor of Germany,” “the Sultan of Turkey,” and “the Czar of Russia.” Not he. He elevated his pupils to a higher sense, a more individual appreciation, of the majesties of the Continent. He told Mike, the saloon keeper’s son, to know himself in future as the French President; Franz Schweibiere became Emperor of Germany; he bestowed royal honors on all his most promising pupils, and he felt proudly conscious that he had planted firmly in their minds, as part of their own identity, the knowledge of the sovereigns who are the arbiters of the Old World’s destiny. We draw a veil over his emotions when on a recent unhappy morning the King of Italy held up a greasy hand and piped out, “Please, sir, de Sultan of Turkey won’t be here to-day. De Emperor of Russia hit him a smash in de eye last night, and blinded him!”
THE LION’S LAMENTATION.
THEY are marching on Herat, half a million men, or more,
Over the frontier they’re swarming;
And they do not seem to mind at all my remonstrative roar,
But grin as if its melody were charming;
Turk and Italian, Teuton and Gaul,
Friends of the past, where, where are ye all?
Great Patience! are ye laughing at the poor old lion’s fall?
Really, the prospect is alarming.
’Tis useless boasting now we can whip them one to ten,
Woe is me! the fact is quite contrary;
We might when “English” soldiers came from Irish hill and glen,
But there’s no recruiting now in Tipperary.
No, nor from Antrim downward to Clare,
From seaboard of Galway across to Kildare,
Can I find a single Irishman to help me anywhere,
Except he be a Corydon or Carey.