"He will be sorry," said Bangs, sarcastically. "He will regret missing you. I will write to him, and mention that you dropped in."

"My name is McFadden," said the man. "I came to break the head of the man who wrote that obituary poetry about my wife. If you don't tell me who perpetrated the following, I'll break yours for you. Where's the man who wrote this? Pay attention:

  1. "'Mrs. McFadden has gone from this life;
  2. She has left all its sorrows and cares;
  3. She caught the rheumatics in both of her legs
  4. While scrubbing the cellar and stairs.
  5. They put mustard-plasters upon her in vain;
  6. They bathed her with whisky and rum;
  7. But Thursday her spirit departed, and left
  8. Her body entirely numb.'"

"The man who held the late Mrs. McFadden up to the scorn of an unsympathetic world in that shocking manner," said the editor, "is named James B. Slimmer. He boards in Blank street, fourth door from the corner. I would advise you to call on him and avenge Mrs. McFadden's wrongs with an intermixture of club and dog-bites."

"And this," sighed the poet, outside the door, "is the man who told me to divert McFadden's mind from contemplation of the horrors of the tomb. It was this monster who counseled me to make the sunshine of McFadden's smiles burst through the tempest of McFadden's tears. If that red-headed monster couldn't smile over that allusion to whisky and rum, if those remarks about the rheumatism in her legs could not divert his mind from the horrors of the tomb, was it my fault? McFadden grovels! He knows no more about poetry than a mule knows about the Shorter Catechism."

The poet determined to leave before any more criticisms were made upon his performances. He jumped down from his chair and crept softly toward the back staircase.

The story told by the foreman relates that Colonel Bangs at the same instant resolved to escape any further persecution, and he moved off in the direction taken by the poet. The two met upon the landing, and the colonel was about to begin his quarrel with Slimmer, when an enraged old woman who had been groping her way up stairs suddenly plunged her umbrella at Bangs, and held him in the corner while she handed a copy of the Argus to Slimmer, and pointing to a certain stanza, asked him to read it aloud. He did so in a somewhat tremulous voice and with frightened glances at the enraged colonel. The verse was as follows:

  1. "Little Alexander's dead;
  2. Jam him in a coffin;
  3. Don't have as good a chance
  4. For a fun'ral often.
  5. Rush his body right around
  6. To the cemetery;
  7. Drop him in the sepulchre
  8. With his Uncle Jerry."

The colonel's assailant accompanied the recitation with such energetic remarks as these: