Circulate many a scandalous word,
And whisper tales they could only have heard
Through some such diabolical trumpet.”
I did not interrupt the outlines of the story to illustrate its wonderful plethora of puns and pranks, but you will not be averse to a moment’s delay here for a taste of its quaint quality. It is altogether a piece of poetical pyrotechny, in which there are verbal rockets, and serpents, and stars and blue-lights, and double-headers; but, as in many of his poems, the humor seems to go off chiefly with the giddy sparkling whirl and whiz of metrical Catherine wheels. The peddler commends his marvelous trumpet to the dame so marvelously deaf:—
“It’s not the thing for me—I know it—
To crack my own trumpet up, and blow it;
But it is the best, and time will show it.
There was Mrs. F.,
So very deaf,
That she might have worn a percussion cap,