Henry Rondeau’s advice was taken, and to-day the great trip-hammer is at work in the basement of the foundry, and the poets and prose-writers are busy at their benches on the upper floors. The master poet is at work among the rest, and sometimes he chuckles as he thinks of the concessions that were wrung from the foundry-owners by the great August strike. But little does the master poet dream of the vengeance that awaits him—of the awful midnight oath taken by Joseph Harper after he had signed the treaty with his employees.
Not until after death will that oath be fulfilled. Not until the members of the Poets’ Union have borne the remains of their chief to Calvary with a following as numerous as that which accompanies the deceased aunt of a Broadway janitor to her last resting-place—not until then will the surviving members of the firm carry out the sacred trust imposed upon them.
They will collect the poems of the master poet and publish them in a mouse-colored volume—edited by Arthur Stedman.
ANCIENT FORMS OF AMUSEMENT.
(From the Hypnotic Gazette, January 1, A. D. 2203.)
Workmen employed on the mesmeric dredge near what was in old times the bed of the Harlem River discovered yesterday a leaden box in which was the following manuscript, which gives us a vivid idea of the crude condition of the drama toward the close of the nineteenth century:
“FUN ON THE ROOF.”
Farce Comedy in Three Acts.