Dipps was silent after this for a few minutes. But he wasn’t going to be put down without a desperate effort. He drew out his large scarf-pin. He called our attention to what appeared to be a drop of water in the centre of the colorless stone. No, the stone was not real. It was not a diamond. It was far more precious. That small dewy globule inside was worth a hundred diamonds of its size. It had been borne from the mystic shores of Lake Nyanza by a mighty traveller. It had passed into Dipps’s hands by a miracle. It was the tear Livingstone had shed when he first met Stanley. And Dipps smiled a lofty smile at the coming Daniel Webster, which said, as plainly as a candle-contriver’s grin could say anything, “Trot out your curiosities, now, old man, and match that if you’re able.”
Hang me if that expectant recruit to the ranks of the legislators didn’t squelch Dipps with a third coincidence. It was extraordinary—it was almost fabulous, he said, but he had another breastpin which contained a companion tear to Dipps’s. The knight of the soap-pan flatly denied the assertion. Livingstone had only shed one tear; that tear hadn’t been divided into suitable lots; it remained intact, complete, unmutilated, and he (Dipps) was its proud possessor.
“I didn’t say,” gently interposed the coming victim of some future Tom Reed, “I didn’t say that I had the tear Livingstone shed when the advent of the New York Herald Central African tourist pumped that saline particle up. No, sir; but I have a lachrymose relic equally enthralling in the interest which it must inspire.”
“Pooh!” snorted Dipps contemptuously, “what have you, what can you have, that approaches within a hemisphere of my historic, geographic treasure?”
“My friend,” replied the next man to be counted in his absence by the Speaker, “I do not grudge you the tear that Livingston shed when he embraced Stanley, for know that I have the identical tear that Stanley didn’t shed on that occasion, nor since, that I’m aware of.”
MULROONEY.—A TROOPER’S TALE.
WE were stanch and brave a company as ever saddled steeds;
When proclamations filled the land, our signatures were deeds;
When Mosby’s horse we fell across, the heads that met our blades
Lost count of stolen cattle, and could plan no future raids.
We blazed with glory, but a cloud around its radiance hung;
Unto the bays that decked our brows a slimy creeper clung—
For word passed round from camp to camp: The man for whom we’d die,
The darling of our devil-dares, Mulrooney, was a spy!
Mulrooney was our squadron’s pride; its star, its guiding lance;
The last to leave a losing fight, the foremost to advance;
His laughter chased the poison from the fever-breeding swamp;
His merry heart and blithesome ways made sunshine in the camp.
So when the provost-marshal came and marched Mulrooney out,
Each trooper’s face with wrath aflame bespoke rebellious doubt;
Till our captain came and “soothered” us, and said, “We’ll have to try
To clear our troop’s bad record that it ever held a spy.”
Oh, our captain was a jewel, with his oily locks of jet,
His shiny spurs of silver, and his gold-fringed epaulette;
The daintiest of kidskin gloves controlled his charger’s reins,
The bluest flood of Norman blood coursed proudly through his veins;
His voice had quite a lordly lisp, in warning or command—
A pearl in iron setting was this leader of our band;
But gem and metal never fused, and that’s the reason why
Our boys despised the perfumed dude and loved the roughspun “spy.”
The morn Mulrooney went away, our “pretty” captain led
Our troop to where a squadron of the Johnnies slept, he said;
But as we trod a darksome gorge, a flash of flame ahead,
A roar of musketry behind, an ambush told, instead!
Entrapped like rats, like rats we fought, in desperate despair—
One sabre ’gainst ten rifles, and no outlet front or rear,
Our captain faded from our sight, while rose a frenzied cry:
“By God! the cur has sold us out! Mulrooney was no spy!”