West Bromwich has my profound sympathy. I read in a Birmingham paper that "there is a complete deadlock with regard to the mayoralty of West Bromwich for the coming year. The deputation appointed at the meeting in August have waited upon several eligible gentlemen to try and induce them to accept office, but without any success up to the present. Alderman Rollason has declined, and Councillor Bushell will not undertake the duties, and the committee are now doing their best to induce Councillor Slater to take the position a second time." By this time, let us hope, the difficulty may have been removed, for imagination boggles at the idea of a town without a mayor.
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West Bromwich's Committee-men, they fairly tore their hair. In all West Bromwich's expanse they could not find a Mayor. Each deputy with anguish notes his prematurely shed lock, But, dash it, what are men to do confronted by a deadlock? Each portly Alderman his Aldermanic self excuses, In vain they try the Councillors, for every one refuses. Declined with thanks by Rollason, the honour next they proffer To Bushell, who, in turn, declines their most obliging offer. Next, moving on, they tempt again their ex-Mayor, Mr. Slater, "Be thou," they cry, with emphasis, "our mayoral dictator. With badge and chain and gown of fur it's not a paltry billet; The breach is ready-made," they say; "step into it and fill it. A vacuum a nuisance is, we ask thee to abate it; Our edifice is roofless now, climb up and promptly slate it."
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If Mr. Slater should ultimately decline the proffered mayoralty, the only suggestion I can make is that somebody should be pricked for the office. I don't quite know what it means, but I know that every year some forty estimable gentlemen are pricked for the shrievalty of their respective counties. One after another they arise in the Court of Justice in which this terrible ceremony takes place and declare that there are circumstances which absolutely forbid them to accept the post of High Sheriff. One pleads a reduced rental, another asks to be excused on the ground of failing health, but the plea is allowed in very few cases, and in the end most of them are reluctantly pricked. The new cook on board ship in Charles Dickens's American Notes was boxed up with the Captain standing over him, and was forced to roll out pastry which he protested, being of a highly bilious nature, it was death to him merely to look at. But he had to roll it out all the same. So it ought to be with an unwilling candidate for a mayoralty.
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Let us be just to our American cousins in spite of boat-racing and yacht-racing fiascos. There are certain things that they obviously order much better than we do. For instance, when the silly season presses they just mark out one of their prominent literary men and have him attacked by highwaymen. At least this is what lately happened to Mr. Richard Harding Davis, for I read in Harper's Weekly that "a considerable number of daily journals of average veracity in New York and Boston published accounts of Mr. Davis's encounter, differing to such a degree in details that each paper seemed to derive its information from an independent source. The very variation of the reports was an indication of a basis to the original tale: but after all, the despatch which carried most conviction was one only four lines long, in which Mr. Davis was quoted as intimating that some industrious writer had lied about him."
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Notice again how magnificently they manage an earthquake. Little more than a week ago a telegram, emanating from Tegucigalpa in Honduras, was published in the New York Herald. In this it was stated that "mail advices from Yetapan announced that a terrible earthquake had occurred in that section of the country." There were elaborate details. Three hundred persons perished. Four thousand people from the outlying villages flocked into the city. During the night "sheets of flame appeared at different points in the north-west rising to immense heights. A church tower crashed down, carrying with it the roofs of three houses. Just before daylight a prolonged shock rocked the entire town as though it were a cradle, and on the mountain side quantities of grazing cattle were engulfed by lava. At Covajunca thirty-seven houses were laid in ruins: at Cayuscat twenty-nine houses collapsed. A later despatch states that 353 bodies have already been recovered." In short, this earthquake was carried out in a style of lavish completeness, and no expense was spared to make it a record convulsion. It is unnecessary to add that it never happened. There wasn't a single quake in the whole of Honduras. Like Falstaff's assailants, and like the highwaymen that waylaid Mr. Richard Harding Davis, it wore a suit of buckram. And of all qualities of buckram the American is unquestionably the best.
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