III.—For Music Lovers
From all piano-players save Paderewski, Godowski and Mark Hambourg; and from the William Tell and 1812 overtures; and from bad imitations of Victor Herbert by Victor Herbert; and from persons who express astonishment that Dr. Karl Muck, being a German, is devoid of all bulge, corporation, paunch or leap-tick; and from the saxophone, the piccolo, the cornet and the bagpipes; and from the theory that America has no folk-music; and from all symphonic poems by English composers; and from the tall, willing, horse-chested, ham-handed, quasi-gifted ladies who stagger to their legs in gloomy drawing rooms after bad dinners and poison the air with Tosti’s Good-bye; and from the low prehensile, godless laryngologists who prostitute their art to the saving of tenors who are happily threatened with loss of voice; and from clarinet cadenzas more than two inches in length; and from the first two acts of Il Trovatore; and from such fluffy, xanthous whiskers as Lohengrins wear; and from sentimental old maids who sink into senility lamenting that Brahms never wrote an opera; and from programme music, with or without notes; and from Swiss bell-ringers, Vincent D’Indy, the Paris Opera, and Elgar’s Salut d’Amour; and from the doctrine that Massenet was a greater composer than Dvorák; and from Italian bands and Schnellpostdoppelschraubendampfer orchestras; and from Raff’s Cavatina and all of Tschaikowsky except ten per centum; and from prima donna conductors who change their programmes without notice, and so get all the musical critics into a sweat; and from the abandoned hussies who sue tenors for breach of promise; and from all alleged musicians who do not shrivel to the size of five-cent cigars whenever they think of old Josef Haydn—good Lord, deliver us!
IV.—For Hangmen
From clients who delay the exercises by pausing to make long and irrelevant speeches from the scaffold, or to sing depressing Methodist hymns; and from medical examiners who forget their stethoscopes, and clamor for waits while messenger boys are sent for them; and from official witnesses who faint at the last minute, and have to be hauled out by the deputy sheriffs; and from undertakers who keep looking at their watches and hinting obscenely that they have other engagements at 10:30; and from spiritual advisers who crowd up at the last minute and fall through the trap with the condemned—good Lord, deliver us!
V.—For Magazine Editors
From Old Subscribers who write in to say that the current number is the worst magazine printed since the days of the New York Galaxy; and from elderly poetesses who have read all the popular text-books of sex hygiene, and believe all the bosh in them about the white slave trade, and so suspect the editor, and even the publisher, of sinister designs; and from stories in which a rising young district attorney gets the dead wood upon a burly political boss named Terrence O’Flaherty, and then falls in love with Mignon, his daughter, and has to let him go; and from stories in which a married lady, just about to sail for Capri with her husband’s old Corpsbruder, is dissuaded from her purpose by the news that her husband has lost $700,000 in Wall Street and is on his way home to weep on her shoulder; and from one-act plays in which young Cornelius Van Suydam comes home from The Club at 11:55 P. M. on Christmas Eve, dismisses Dodson, his Man, with the compliments of the season, and draws up his chair before the open fire to dream of his girl, thus preparing the way for the entrance of Maxwell, the starving burglar, and for the scene in which Maxwell’s little daughter, Fifi, following him up the fire-escape, pleads with him to give up his evil courses; and from poems about war in which it is argued that thousands of young men are always killed, and that their mothers regret to hear of it; and from essays of a sweet and whimsical character, in which the author refers to himself as “we,” and ends by quoting Bergson, Washington Irving or Agnes Repplier; and from epigrams based on puns, good or bad; and from stories beginning, “It was the autumn of the year 1950”; and from stories embodying quotations from Omar Khayyam, and full of a mellow pessimism; and from stories in which the gay nocturnal life of the Latin Quarter is described by an author living in Dubuque, Iowa; and from stories of thought transference, mental healing and haunted houses; and from newspaper stories in which a cub reporter solves the mystery of the Snodgrass murder and is promoted to dramatic critic on the field, or in which a city editor who smokes a corn-cob pipe falls in love with a sob-sister; and from stories about trained nurses, young dramatists, baseball players, heroic locomotive engineers, settlement workers, clergymen, yeggmen, cowboys, Italians, employés of the Hudson Bay Company and great detectives; and from stories in which the dissolute son of a department store owner tries to seduce a working girl in his father’s employ and then goes on the water wagon and marries her as a tribute to her virtue; and from stories in which the members of a yachting party are wrecked on a desert island in the South Pacific, and the niece of the owner of the yacht falls in love with the bo’sun; and from manuscripts accompanied by documents certifying that the incidents and people described are real, though cleverly disguised; and from authors who send in saucy notes when their offerings are returned with insincere thanks; and from lady authors who appear with satirical letters of introduction from the low, raffish rogues who edit rival magazines—good Lord, deliver us!