“One of these men, who is now the champion scrapper, as one American author has it, was once a poor boy, but he was proud and ambitious. So he practiced on his wife evenings, after she had washed the dishes, until he found that he could 'knock her out,' as the American has it. Then he tried it on other relatives, and step by step advanced till he could make almost any man in America cough up pieces of this upholstered mitten which he wears in public.
“In closing this chapter on New York, I may say that I have not said so much of the city itself as I would like, but enough so that he who reads with care may feel somewhat familiar with it. New York is situated on the east side of America, near New Jersey City. The climate is cool and frosty a part of the year, but warm and temperate in the summer months. The surface is generally level, but some of the houses are quite tall.
“I would not advise Frenchmen to go to New York now, but rather to wait until the pedestal of M. Bartholdi's Statue of Liberty has been paid for. Many foreigners have already been earnestly permitted to help pay for this pedestal.”
Rev. Mr. Hallelujah's Hoss.
There are a good many difficult things to ride, I find, beside the bicycle and the bucking Mexican plug. Those who have tried to mount and successfully ride a wheelbarrow in the darkness of the stilly night will agree with me.
You come on a wheelbarrow suddenly when it is in a brown study, and you undertake to straddle it, so to speak, and all at once you find the wheelbarrow on top. I may say, I think, safely, that the wheelbarrow is, as a rule, phlegmatic and cool; but when a total stranger startles it, it spreads desolation and destruction on every hand.
This is also true of the perambulator, or baby-carriage. I undertook to evade a child's phaeton, three years ago last spring, as it stood in the entrance to a hall in Main street. The child was not injured, because it was not in the carriage at the time; but I was not so fortunate. I pulled pieces of perambulator out of myself for two weeks with the hand that was not disabled.
How a sedentary man could fall through a child's carriage in such a manner as to stab himself with the awning and knock every spoke out of three wheels, is still a mystery to me, but I did it. I can show you the doctor's bill now.