"Vot you vantsh mit your schnapps und lager?
Coom down into der Rhine!
Der ish pottles der Kaiser Charlemagne
Vonce filled mit gold-red wine!"
Dat fetched him—he shtood all shpell pound;
She pooled his coat-tails down,
She drawed him oonder der wasser,
De maidens mit nodings on.
THE HOOSIER AND THE SALT PILE
BY DANFORTH MARBLE
"I'm sorry," said Dan, as he knocked the ashes from his regalia, as he sat in a small crowd over a glass of sherry, at Florence's, New York, one evening,—"I'm sorry that the stages are disappearing so rapidly. I never enjoyed traveling so well as in the slow coaches. I've made a good many passages over the Alleghanies, and across Ohio, from Cleveland to Columbus and Cincinnati, all over the South, down East, and up North, in stages, and I generally had a good time.
"When I passed over from Cleveland to Cincinnati, the last time, in a stage, I met a queer crowd. Such a corps, such a time, you never did see. I never was better amused in my life. We had a good team,—spanking horses, fine coaches, and one of them drivers you read of. Well, there was nine 'insiders,' and I don't believe there ever was a stage full of Christians ever started before, so chuck full of music.
"There was a beautiful young lady going to one of the Cincinnati academies; next to her sat a Jew peddler,—Cowes and a market; wedging him was a dandy black-leg, with jewelry and chains around about his breast and neck enough to hang him. There was myself, and an old gentleman with large spectacles, gold-headed cane, and a jolly, soldering-iron-looking nose; by him was a circus-rider, whose breath was enough to breed yaller fever and could be felt just as easy as cotton velvet! A cross old woman came next, whose look would have given any reasonable man the double-breasted blues before breakfast; alongside of her was a rale backwoods preacher, with the biggest and ugliest mouth ever got up since the flood. He was flanked by the low comedian of the party, an Indiana Hoosier, 'gwine down to Orleans to get an army contrac' to supply the forces, then in Mexico, with beef.
"We rolled along for some time. Nobody seemed inclined to 'open.' The old aunty sat bolt upright, looking crab-apples and persimmons at the hoosier and the preacher; the young lady dropped the green curtain of her bonnet over her pretty face, and leaned back in her seat to nod and dream over japonicas and jumbles, pantalets and poetry; the old gentleman, proprietor of the Bardolph nose, looked out at the corduroy and swashes; the gambler fell off into a doze, and the circus convoy followed suit, leaving the preacher and me vis-à-vis and saying nothing to nobody. 'Indiany,' he stuck his mug out of the window and criticized the cattle we now and then passed. I was wishing somebody would give the conversation a start, when 'Indiany' made a break.
"'This ain't no great stock country,' says he to the old gentleman with the cane.