A few nights after this rebuff, the youth happened to be at another party, and seeing the judge there, made up to him, and after a word or two about the weather, observed: 'That was an awkward blunder of mine the other evening, to take you for old Thornton!'
'And whom do you take me for now, may I ask?' was the reply.
'Why,' said he, feeling rather bewildered by the other's manner, 'you told me you were Judge Poland, of Vermont.'
'On the contrary, sir, my name is Thornton,' was the annihilating response.
The victim to this case of awkward duality was not so much to be pitied as his fellow-countryman Slimmer, who fared worse from a similar mistake that was none of his making. Slimmer, a modest young bachelor, peeping into the ladies' waiting-room at a railway station, found a pair of plump arms round his neck, a lady's head resting lovingly on his manly bosom, and half-a-dozen youngsters of nicely graduated sizes clasping his legs, tugging at his coat-tails, and crying 'Papa!' at the top of their voices. While the half-strangled victim was struggling to disentangle himself from his affectionate surroundings, a gentleman rushed into the waiting-room, took the situation in at a glance, floored the innocent Slimmer with his carpet-bag, and then sat upon him. When he came to himself he was in bed in the infirmary, a bruised and battered bachelor; and all he got for his pains was a grumbling apology from his assailant for the unfortunate mistake his wife had made. The common lot of sufferers from the mistakes of such over-hasty folk.
Jealous-minded people are particularly prone to misconceptions involving serious results. The captain of a schooner trading between San Francisco and Mexico left his wife in a tenement house in San Francisco. He had been away some twelve months, when one night as his wife was nursing the baby of a neighbour, the door of her room opened and she saw her husband standing looking at her. She rose to greet him; but repulsing her with an oath, he turned on his heel and was gone, leaving her to cry herself to sleep. A knock at the door awoke her. Before she could reach it, her husband was in the room, his hand at her throat. Dragging her shrieking to the window, he would have thrown her from it; but her cries had drawn a crowd in front of the house, and the unhappy woman managed to extricate herself from his strong grasp, only to feel a knife enter her flesh, and to fall senseless to the ground. The infuriated seaman made for the stairway, where he was met by a crowd of men. Threatening to shoot the first who came near him, he smashed in a door of a room, jumped through a window, and although pursued, reached the Chinese quarter, and was lost in its labyrinths. The occupant of the room through which he had dashed so unceremoniously, hearing the commotion without comprehending it, sprang out of bed and fired a shot; upon which somebody outside in the hall fired another. 'Lynch him!' was the cry; and in a very short time the guiltless occupant of the room was under a lamp-post, and would have been dangling from it but for the intervention of the people about, who assured the excited mob that the actual assailant of the woman was already beyond reach. The woman was not killed; but whether her hasty mate discovered his mistake and atoned for it, is not recorded.
Not so tragical in consequence was another instance of jumping to conclusions. A blushing damsel of forty summers or so entered the town-clerk's office at Wheeling, West Virginia, and asked for a license. The clerk took down her name and address and asked for that of 'the other party.' 'Faithful; he lives with me,' said the applicant. The clerk eyed her curiously, but keeping his thoughts to himself, filled up the paper and handed it over. The lady glanced at it, shrieked out 'Monster!' and swept out of the office, leaving the offender dumfounded at the explosion; till it flashed upon his mind that possibly a dog license, not a marriage license, was what the spinster wanted.
Equally unhappy in interpreting a lady's meaning was a timid young man of Titusville. Calling upon a pretty girl one evening, she said: 'I want to propose to you'——
'You are very kind,' gasped the alarmed visitor; 'but I am not worthy of such happiness; in fact none of our family are marrying people—besides, my income is limited, and I have to meet a friend, and I'm afraid I'll be late.' He was making his exit without waiting to put on his overcoat, through the door of a cupboard.
'Why,' said the young woman, 'I wanted to propose to you to accompany me as far as Main Street; that was all.'