It was gorgeous. In ten minutes we had three fireengines and a division of police in the street; in half an hour there were several attempts at suicide of leading residents of the locality; and before our “grand finale” was finally done with there wasn’t a juvenile or adult within half a mile that didn’t feel he or she had had music enough to last a lifetime.
If I am disturbed any more by the operators round me, I shall give them another dose of my orchestra. I will. I have sworn it.
A LIAR LAID OUT.
WE have an amiable tallow-chandler and soap-boiler in our street, who certainly should have been a novelist. I firmly believe he could give weight to Baron Munchausen, Jules Verne, M. de Chaillu, or the London Times in the matter of exaggeration, and romp in an easy winner. The whoppers that spreader of lies and light can tell would raise the hair on the head of an Egyptian mummy.
But he met his match last week.
I happened to be in our club-room with Dipps, when there entered an acquaintance of mine, a gentleman who aspires to legislative honors. Of course Congressional candidates must acquire the art of so embellishing and embroidering the naked truth as to make it attractive. Well, my friend has been studying this science, and he has advanced so far that he can dispense with facts altogether now. His enemies aver that the truth isn’t in him. I wouldn’t say that myself. I think it is in him—very much in him—it’s impossible to get it out of him.
I didn’t think of this, or I wouldn’t have introduced him to Dipps. I regretted it on the spot. Dipps was smoking a peculiar pipe. The future member noticed it. He made some slight remark about it. Dipps was all there. He replied on the instant that that was the identical pipe that Napoleon III. was smoking when he surrendered at Sedan. He had procured it from a wandering Teutonic troubadour, who had picked it up when the Emperor dropped it to hand his sword to his German conqueror.
The statesman expressed no surprise. He merely observed that by a strange coincidence he possessed the stump of the cigar which had fallen from Marshal MacMahon’s lips when his eleventh horse was shot under him at Worth. He had purchased the souvenir from a Zouave with two wooden legs and a glass eye, who had secured the half-finished weed and was smoking it out when a fragment of a shell drove it and a couple of teeth into the back of his head, from which they were extracted by the regimental surgeon. He had one of the teeth, too, fitted into his own gums. He showed it to Dipps.
I could see Dipps was rather staggered. He changed the subject. He exhibited his walking-stick. Remarkable stick, that. It was manufactured out of one of the railway carriages blown into the river on the night of the terrible Tay bridge disaster, in Scotland. At the risk of his life, a diver had brought up a panel out of that carriage for the express purpose of making that stick.
The embryo representative had another coincidence on hand. He had another walking-stick at home—made out of the thigh bone of the engine-driver of that ill-fated train. It was too ghastly a memento to carry about with him; but he could show it to Dipps at any time, and would point out the half-cooked appearance of a portion of it, arising from the fact that the driver was in the habit of sitting on the boiler in cold weather to warm himself.