He was a little shy of that instrument for some time afterward; but one day an old lady, feeble and flaccid, came in to have a tooth drawn, and thinking it would come out very easy Tushmaker concluded, just by way of variety, to try the machine. He did so, and at the first turn drew the old lady’s skeleton completely and entirely from her body, leaving her a mass of quivering jelly in her chair! Tushmaker took her home in a pillow-case.
The woman lived-seven years after that, and they called her the “India-Rubber Woman.” She had suffered terribly with the rheumatism, but after this occurrence never had a pain in her bones. The dentist kept them in a glass case. After this, the machine was sold to the contract or of the Boston Custom-House, and it was found that a child of three years of age could, by a single turn of the screw, raise a stone weighing twenty-three tons. Smaller ones were made on the same principle and sold to the keepers of hotels and restaurants. They were used for boning turkeys. There is no moral to this story whatever, and it is possible that the circumstances may have become slightly exaggerated. Of course, there can be no doubt of the truth of the main incidents.
Charles Godfrey Leland, a humorist of Philadelphia, wrote almost entirely in a broken German dialect. His Hans Breitmann ballads are still among the famous examples of American humor.
BALLAD
Der noble Ritter Hugo
Von Schwillensaufenstein
Rode out mit shpeer and helmet,
Und he coom to de panks of de Rhine.
Und oop dere rose a meer maid,
Vod hadn’t got nodings on,