Equestrian Entertainment.—The green-room of Drury Lane, all the time the horses were there, was turned into a "Salle à Manger."
REFINEMENT ON THE RANK.
Accomplished Cabman. "William, vooly-voo Aqua?"
AN AMERICAN JOKE EXPLAINED.
We don't understand American institutions—that's a fact. We don't understand the American Press; which is one of the greatest of those institutions. Deficient in the sense of irony, we take the playful abandonment—the jocose mystification—of the American newspapers as simple statement. Hence multitudes of dull worthy people among us will receive the New York Tribune's account of the reception of the runaway convict, Mitchell, at New York as a prosaic and authentic narrative of that event. Had Greenacre, by some chance, escaped the gallows, they will be inclined to think, he too would have been hailed with enthusiasm and acclamation, as an accession to the worth and manhood of American citizenship. For Mitchell resembled the other chiefly in the circumstance of not having been hanged. He was no mere political non-conformist and unsuccessful opponent of the existing order of things, vulgarly and technically termed a rebel. He was a traitor in the vilest sense of the word: a malignant hater of the Queen and the country: the sort of traitor that mediæval justice contemplated when it sentenced the criminal so called to be hanged, drawn, and quartered. He was a sanguinary cruel caitiff; a dogged miscreant who not only preached pike massacres, but yelled and raved for sulphuric acid, which he would have had rascals to squirt into soldiers' eyes. Those, therefore, who are not up to American drollery will naturally be scandalised by the seemingly sympathetic description, given by the New York Tribune, of the advent of such a fellow amongst the freest and most enlightened people on earth. Says our facetious contemporary:—
"As the Prometheus came up the river, she was boarded by Messrs. Meagher and William Mitchell, the brother of the patriot. The meeting between these friends in sorrow and persecution was affecting in the extreme. Tears of joy were shed on both sides."